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Is Chinese going to be the lingua franca? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| vientito Senior Member Canada Joined 6339 days ago 212 posts - 281 votes  | Message 113 of 249 07 November 2009 at 2:43pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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we have to go back to the fundamental of things. power speaks. with power comes followers. you cannot simply look at the current state of affairs to predict the future.
the lingua franca of yesteryear did not belong to English and certainly that of the future will not be English. who will that be? it will almost always belong to a culture which dictates the affairs of the globe. the nature of the language itself matters little. again, it is power that speaks. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| w1n73rmu7e Newbie United States Joined 5941 days ago 31 posts - 46 votes | Message 114 of 249 07 November 2009 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Edited by w1n73rmu7e on 07 November 2009 at 10:11pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Dixon Groupie Canada Joined 6052 days ago 54 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* | Message 115 of 249 12 November 2009 at 5:38am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
My point was not that Hu Jin from a farming community continues to buy his groceries without being attacked by their thought police. Although what you said isn't true either--he's afraid to speak up, since the Chinese government ran over people with tanks who previously spoke up. He probably wouldn't be living in a hut with 8 other family members right now if that wasn't the case. What I said is that if the language is ever going to become widespread, there must be freedom of thought. No professor is going to publish his ideas on the free market, or foreign policy, or whatever other idea that may be deemed contrary to the goals of the Chinese state, in an academic Chinese journal or newspaper. Hell, forget the newspapers, Facebook, Google, and Youtube are censored most of the time. That is a major reason why nobody respects academic papers, university degrees, and journalism from over there. Now, you may counter with examples of isolate fragments of Chinese society proudly voicing their views without fear of censorship, but that is the exception rather than the rule. I hope that one day the Chinese will be able to have freedom of speech. As history shows us, the intellectual leaders of civilization were always those countries that had the most liberal laws regarding speech. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Dixon Groupie Canada Joined 6052 days ago 54 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* | Message 116 of 249 12 November 2009 at 5:55am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Here is an interesting discussion about Chinese Nobel Prize winners (there are none):
http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/2006/10/list_of_chinese_nob e.html The problem is that the Chinese state is not conducive to free thought and creativity. China doesn't really create much, after all, it doesn't respect patents or intellectual property at all. Everything that it is doing well right now (industrializing) is copy- catting something Europe did 400 years ago. This all leads to my point of freedom of speech being needed in the country, so a climate of free thought and the discussion of ideas can bloom from 1 billion smart people there. When I went to graduate school in Korea, half of my classes consisted of Chinese foreign students. In classes like international relations or economics, I would say that it was a rule that my Chinese counterparts were deluded, ignorant, and uneducated. They were simply not used to discussing ideas of this nature (because of the system they came from) however eager to learn they were. Most of the people studying abroad, that I asked, were children of Communist Party members. Those are the people who most often can afford to send their children off for expensive graduate degrees. This all relates back to the point that if a language is to be dominant, it must be the language of the intellectual innovators. Otherwise many people will not be convinced the need to learn it. Edited by Dixon on 12 November 2009 at 5:58am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6769 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 117 of 249 12 November 2009 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
During the United States' early decades — arguably its most creative period and the one that turned it from a backwater colony to a powerful nation — it was exactly the same way. Many early industries could only flourish and be developed in the US because no one cared about copyrights and patents. Heck, Hollywood was the result when aspiring filmmakers went searching for somewhere they could escape Thomas Edison's filmmaking patents and ended up choosing California. Edited by Captain Haddock on 12 November 2009 at 1:37pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5522 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 118 of 249 12 November 2009 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I am not so sure about that. Latin was a dominant language more than a thousand years after the fall of Rome, which never was much of a place for innovation in the first place. They got everything from the Greeks. More or less. It is also arguable if French and German were the languages of choice in Scandinavia and Russia because of those countries' "intellectual innovativeness". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Hoopskidoodle Senior Member United States Joined 5501 days ago 55 posts - 68 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 120 of 249 13 November 2009 at 5:56am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Even in China was to become an economically hegemonic superpower--and I don't believe that will happen for a couple of reasons--Americans, by and large, would never endeavor to learn Chinese, or any other language for that matter. Some business types, who hope to either crack the Chinese market or exploit its cheap labor pool, are, of course, motivated to learn Mandarin now. However, nothing I've seen has ever indicated to me that the average American wants anything to do with any place outside of North America, and to be brutally honest, only the upper 2/3 of that.I believe that geographic isolation and the ubiquity of English on this continent, combined with the somewhat isolationist American weltanschauung, precludes significant interest in learning another language regardless of the economic fortunes of the rest of the world. This is, of course, only my opinion. Edited by Hoopskidoodle on 13 November 2009 at 5:56am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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