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Chinese will rule the World Wide Web | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| HenryMW Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5179 days ago 125 posts - 179 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, French Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 58 of 121 18 July 2011 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Interesting video. I don't have the time right not to address nway's post since I have an exam tomorrow. I will say this about the video. The graph at the end is logarithmic, so don't buy into the slopes too much. The slopes at the end flatten out because of that and because poorer counties get all the low hanging fruit. Also, my suspicion is that China will likely never achieve US levels of wealth per capita for the same reasons why Europe hasn't. But I could be wrong. It's impossible to guess how a country will go politically.
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| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6039 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 59 of 121 18 July 2011 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I have to take issue with Fiveonefive.
Firs of all, the internet runs mostly on open-source software ( servers and other networking equipment are the biggest market share for Linux ). As you probably know open-source can be modified and used free of charge. Linux is pretty much an international project, it incorporates the work of many non-US and non-western developers. It's also worth mentioning that internet hardware is generic. It consist of the same components you have in your PC, most of them manufactured in China. So we could say the US is in the embarrassing position of having its internet hardware manufactured in China ;-). The Chinese are definitely not it the position of having to "buy the technology from the US". And what's more the internet is very decentralized by nature. If, for example, China decides to nuke the US ( I hope they won't, just to illustrate... ) their part of the network won't be affected. Only websites located in the US will be affected e.g. Google would go down not Baidu ;-). If you think the internet has critical infrastructure in the US, let me dispel that illusion. But it is true that the US serves as the standardizing authority, due to political and historical reasons. The Chinese could easily setup their separate internet should they want to. So far they prefer to stay connected, becasue it makes sense from a commercial point of view. And once they have decided to stay connected, it becomes extremely difficult to exert total control. Take a look at file sharing for example. The US government is doing a pretty bad job of controlling it, even on their own territory. Similarly, the Chinese also fail at their attempts of controlling the uncontrollable. Edited by Sennin on 18 July 2011 at 5:44pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| strummer Diglot Newbie Switzerland Joined 4927 days ago 38 posts - 53 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 60 of 121 18 July 2011 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm 21 years old, and among the people of my generation and older and even younger,
when i talk about china they: know absolutely nothing, start to say ching chung chang, say that all Asians are short and look the same, keep confusing japan with china (something really dangerous in China!!!), in few words they know nothing about the country and they have absolutely no interest in it. I see already that 99% of the people in my region( Canton ticino of Switzerland)where we speak Italian, have a deep rooted hate for the German language, this hate is nurtured by their ignorance about this country/culture, the same ignorance they have for China. In switzerland is REALLY IMPORTANT for get a job the knowledge of the German language but even so no one like it or do more than requested by the teacher for learn it, and they still really don't like it(so: no German music,movies,ecc). Germany is a western country and 60% of swiss people share culture and language with them, and still this does'nt make people want to learn the language, even we are compatriots and we share a very similar culture. While the more mature people show some interest/respect for china, but still a very small interest, western culture/languages are for the majority of the people in my country by far the number 1. People will have to learn mandarin for business(but i think only managers and so, while normal employees(70% of the population) will not learn it) but not for love for the language/culture. why? 1. because is very distant and different culture 2. the entertainment(music,movies,ecc) are dominated by English 3. the science is dominated by english 4. English words have taken a strong positions in romance languages. 5. the mindset of chinese people is too far from the western one(about marriage, love, clothes, hobbies, ideas, philosophy of life,ecc) This is my opinion as a swiss person that for the fact of beign married with a Chinese citizien, china keep entering in the discussion during the school and with my friends, and like this i can get to know the opinion of my compatriots about china. By who knows, in Italian we say ''chi vivrà vedrà'', that roughly translated means: who will live will see. Edited by strummer on 18 July 2011 at 6:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6055 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 61 of 121 19 July 2011 at 3:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think the debate here of whether China is rising and the U.S. is stalling or even
declining is rather trivial and has been beaten to death. I don't think that many people here would argue that in the future, China's power will meet or even exceed that of the U.S. In fact, it will be a return to normalcy since China, for thousands of years, has held a majority of the world's GDP and was for thousands of years far richer than Europe. What the true question is; how does a country's of culture's power translate into people adopting their language? Looking at China is especially complex because, as most of you know, the Chinese don't conquer in the western sense. China is not the west, and has a totally different view on their own culture's superiority. In 1403, Zheng He made a voyage to the middle east and Africa, 150 before the Spanish ruled the seas. Then what happened? Did people get converted to Confucianism? Was the Chinese language brought to thousands of natives? No. Basically nothing happened. After that voyage, the fleet was dismantled, never to be repeated. Questions need to be asked on, supposing that if China was the most powerful country in the world, what would happen? Actually, it already has happened, and we can learn how they handled their power, versus the west, from history. Edited by irrationale on 19 July 2011 at 3:48am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5420 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 62 of 121 19 July 2011 at 4:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Not to disagree with most of what you said, but Europe today can hardly be compared to Europe of the past. If the EU were to consolidate itself into one superpower country, I'm quite certain it would make no attempts at colonization, culturally or otherwise. Sure, there are the Goethe-Institut and the Instituto Cervantes—the latter having 54 centers in 20 different countries—but then again, as of mid last year, there were 316 Confucius Institutes and 337 Confucius Classrooms in 94 countries and regions, with the Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language aiming to establish 1,000 Confucius Institutes by 2020 — this is clearly a break from the Chinese insularity of the past. One also only need spend a few minutes on YouTube to see that Chinese people are extremely eager to teach their language to foreigners, which confirms that this is an actual shift in cultural mentality, and not just a change in top-level governmental policy. Also, China most definitely has perpetrated imperialism in the past. The difference is that this imperialism was geographically contiguous with China's ever-expanding borders. Edited by nway on 19 July 2011 at 4:49am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5413 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 63 of 121 20 July 2011 at 10:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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26 characters to learn vs ... A gazillion?
One language in which an afternoon of studying is sufficient to at least make an attempt at pronouncing any given written word and another in which it might take 2+ years to do the same exact thing? This one is easy. Outside of population growth passing on the language, there's only one way this "language race" is going to flow, and it's not going to involve hundreds of millions of latin-based alphabet users (or users of any other type of alphabet for that matter) learning Chinese. On purely pragmatic grounds, without getting into the ridiculous "my country is better than your country" arguments the thread has wandered into, the idea is absurd. The opposite however, is already happening. And if anything, increasing drastically, in spite of Chinese censorship. Frankly, if we were to zoom forward 150 years and found English replaced by another language in prominence, I'd put far more money on it being Spanish than Mandarin. Edited by Sandman on 20 July 2011 at 11:20am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 64 of 121 20 July 2011 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
An interesting post here that highlights the enormous learning barrier that Mandarin faces as a potential worldwide lingua franca. The other side of the equation is of course the impact of English on Chinese. Whatever its merits--and there are some--the Chinese writing system is cumbersome and certainly not computer-friendly. Could the spread of English in China be a factor in the switch to a latin-based script? This might not be as ludicrous as it sounds when looking far enough down the line. English itself is changing. The rise of texting may even lead to a kind of backdoor reform of the notorious spelling system. We may eventually see some form of universal English or true Globish that will co-exist with all the various national varieties of English and the other languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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