Chinese Written Language To Dominate Internet 535
Zothecula writes "In the beginning, the language of the World Wide Web was English. Times change though, and the United States military's gift to civilization knows no national boundaries, and growing worldwide adoption of the internet has changed the audience make-up to such an extent that the dominant language of the internet is about to become Chinese. That's not to say the Chinese are all that comfortable with this either. There has just been an official decree requiring the use of Chinese translations for all English words and phrases in newspapers, magazines and web sites. While all countries have watched the unregulated global nature of the internet erode traditional cultural values and the integrity of national languages, it seems the Chinese powers-that-be have concluded that the purity of the Chinese language needs to be preserved."
Yeah, right (Score:1, Interesting)
Somehow I don't think that a language made up of something like 50,000 ideograms is going to overtake a more reasonable language made out of 26 letters and some punctuation.
Whats the problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
I work in the middle east and EVERYTHING written has to be translated into Arabic and English. What this means at the moment is that good translators are in high demand (of which there are not nearly enough).
Esperanto (Score:5, Interesting)
This language took me just 2 weeks to learn. It is fully expressive and totally logical- in my eyes as a programmer & mathematician it is beautiful. You can express things not possible in English even.
English speakers often forget there's this whole other world out there. Imagine how unproductive it is that many nations are all working in parallel.
Any questions? Go to lernu.net forums or #esperanto on freenode.
Esperanto is EXTREMELY easy to learn. Apart from not having any exceptions which hinder language learning, it uses a system of prefixes and suffixes. This way you can start with a very small vocabulary base and build words. Often I just invent new words on the fly to express a feeling or concept which might not have an English equivalent.
After 2 weeks of obsessive dedicated study I could speak it. A few months of occasional chatting and I use it naturally without effort in an expressive way.
Example:
sana = health
sanulo (san + ulo) = healthy person
sanulejo (san + ul + ejo) = place for healthy people
malsanulejo (mal + san + ul + ejo) = hospital (place for unhealthy people)
The vision of Esperanto is commonly misconstrued as the whole world speaking one language. This is not the goal at all. Esperanto is an AUXILLARY language- a language in addition to your native language just for the purpose of inter- communication with other cultures.
Esperanto is often labelled as 'artificial', but it is anything but. The language evolves according to usage by people. Only the core grammar/10 rules remain fixed.
Science papers, nobel nominated works of poetry and other works have all tested and used extensively the language demonstrating that it works. A century of usage has molded it.
If you believe in preserving local languages, then the obstacle is the difficulty in learning current (transient) international languages which are hard and discriminatory (Esperanto is neutral to all countries and belongs to nobody). Encouraging it's use would help promote local languages, instead of conglomerating together with huge behemoth steamroller languages.
I encourage you to approach the topic with an open mind and do some research first. Most people just like to immediately react emotionally and label it with preconceptions. Yet it's the saddest thing we're in a language extinction epoch. Here's a tool that can help us.
"""Four primary schools in Britain, with some 230 pupils, are currently following a course in "propedeutic Esperanto"—that is, instruction in Esperanto to raise language awareness and accelerate subsequent learning of foreign languages—under the supervision of the University of Manchester.[34] Studies have been conducted in New Zealand,[35] United States,[36][37][38]Germany,[39] Italy[40] and Australia.[41] The results of these studies were favorable and demonstrated that studying Esperanto before another foreign language expedites the acquisition of the other, natural, language. This appears to be because learning subsequent foreign languages is easier than learning one's first, while the use of a grammatically simple and culturally flexible auxiliary language like Esperanto lessens the first-language learning hurdle. In one study,[42] a group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years. Similar results have been found for other combinations of native and second languages, as well as for arrangements in which the course of study was reduced to two years, of which six months is spent learning Esperanto."""
Not only is Esperanto good for the 'humanrace', it's very beneficial and practical to a fully selfish person.
By learning the language you help rewire your brain in such a way as to accelerate subsequent language learning. And it is faster to learn Esperanto followed by your choice language, than just dedicatedly learning your choice language. Fact.
Not necessarily popular with the Chinese, either.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't find it off the top of my head, but I once read an article about a Chinese intellectual who argued that the ideographs would have to go for China to reach its full potential.
There are oddities of an ideographic language which do pose some difficulties. Even a fluent full-time writer can encounter new words. In an alphabetic language, if you hear a word, you can guess at how it might be spelled to look it up. In a language like Chinese, you usually (but not always) can't guess how it's written well enough to look it up. Then, if you see it written, you may not have any guess as to how it's pronounced, leaving you with the possibility of encountering a word twice in one day without even a clue that they're the same word.
That's a bit of a simplification, as in some cases you can make a pretty good educated guess as to the sound of a word, or look things up by pronunciation. Still, it's an issue, and it's not just an issue for people who learn Chinese as a second language.
The Chinese are having trouble... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Quantity, not quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
The French have tried to purify their language for centuries. They even have a committee to determine what words can and cannot be added. Which is ironic - when French was first spoken, the French aristocracy regarded it as an inferior Pig Latin. These days, French media outlets are obligated to carry a certain percentage of their output in French.
Now it is fair to say that language and culture are tightly coupled. It is also fair to say that multiple languages are important - current studies suggest that for each language you learn, you add 5+ years to your brain's functional lifespan and you add (an as-yet undetermined) degree of capacity to learn (it bulks the brain up, giving more room for more connections and more complex connections. It follows that preserving a large number of languages is not only socially a good idea but intellectually a necessity to produce the best thinkers.
However, you'll never achieve that through "language purity". (The term for an international language is Lingua Franca - guess who coined the term - and yet despite the language that sparked the term being kept very pure indeed, it is hardly spoken today. Indeed, one could argue that English is the modern Lingua Franca because it is impure and therefore highly adaptable to new situations.)
Language preservation and conservation is Good. Keep it up. But do so for the right reasons and in the right way. Purity is the short path to the Dead Language world. That which does not evolve is doomed to die.
Re:This is it! (Score:4, Interesting)
A strange amount of php info is in Dutch, and Nginx still has a lot of documentations in Russian.
KDE has a fair amount of things in German. There is a strong FreeBSD community that posts in Japanese.
Not exactly a normal set of searches.
Re:Quantity, not quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone or other has said, defending the purity of the English language would be like defending the purity of a cribhouse whore
That would be James Nicoll, back in 1990 on rec.arts.sf-lovers; the complete quote is
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary