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Chinese will rule the World Wide Web | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5416 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 73 of 121 04 August 2011 at 5:14am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
If this thread was about the USA in 2010 vs China in 2010, your article would be the fabulous game-changer you seem to think it is. Unfortunately, this thread is not about 2010. Note the key word in the thread's title:
And when the threadstarter asked this:
...I'm pretty sure he wasn't referring to 2010. Indeed, this:
...doesn't easily reconcile with 2010, unless "in 20 years" occurred one year ago. In short, we're talking about the future, and the future depends on change over time — or growth. For a discussion on growth, feel free to go read through the past 9 pages. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| sipes23 Diglot Senior Member United States pluteopleno.com/wprs Joined 4871 days ago 134 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Latin Studies: Spanish, Ancient Greek, Persian | Message 74 of 121 04 August 2011 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I have no doubt that as Mandarin speakers come online and put content on the internet, English will loose its
share. Only sensible, but the flip-side must be mentioned. As Mandarin's share grows, unless others are equally growing, their share will also shrink. Again, wholly sensible. I am not only considering text, but audio and video. I'm not at all surprised at that. English has a heavy presence on the internet because of the founder effect: it was there first and got a foothold. That there is linguistic diversification on the internet should only surprise a fool or an (ordinary) American. If by ruling the Internet we mean linguistic share of the internet, I see no reason why Mandarin cannot do so. However, it will be like spoken Mandarin: restricted to China and Chinatowns worldwide and even there not as the only Chinese language. On the written front: Now, if they ditch their written heritage, which I doubt they would any more than any other language would, that could make for a different situation. There is no way that a language that inspired this article (http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html) is going to make it as a written/read lingua franca. Online or anywhere else. Zero. Despite the complexities of English orthography, written Mandarin looks positively vicious. Upthread, someone said that Latin alphabets are the only ones that are legible at a variety of sizes. No, they're user friendly. The Persian (modification of the Arabic) alphabet doesn't look too nasty. The Greek alphabet is a walk in the park. Cyrillic looks like I could master it a day of concerted effort. The Inuktitut syllabary doesn't seem too rough. Even hiragana looks like I could master it with a bit of effort. (Of course assuming I want to tackle these languages.) If after years of study of Mandarin characters, where *educated natives* struggle (under Moser's point 3), I still struggle to read items with unusual content, I'm not going to be very willing to put in the effort from the beginning. Even Egyptian hieroglyphs look friendlier. So, yeah. The share of the internet in Mandarin will increase. It may even eclipse English. It will never become widespread as a written form of communication outside of Mandarin speaking online communities. English, and to a lesser degree French, will rule the globe on that front. Unless Mandarin gets an alphabet or syllabary, which they won't. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 75 of 121 04 August 2011 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The Chinese writing will lose its terrifying force when everybody can buy a little device that bypasses it and transforms the result into pinyin with tone diacritics and translations into your preferred dialect of Westernese.
Google translate may still have some way to go before it can tackle the idiomatic differences between Chinese and English (or Danish), but it can probably learn Mandarin faster than I can. Edited by Iversen on 04 August 2011 at 10:29pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5416 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 76 of 121 05 August 2011 at 3:56am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Mandarin already has an alphabet — it's called Pinyin, and it works remarkably well when used in its complete form. Pinyin isn't used as the main written system for Mandarin due to voluntary cultural preference, not some "innate" linguistic limitation. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 77 of 121 08 August 2011 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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When nway writes "complete form" it should be taken to include tones ... and Pinyin can actually be written with accent sign to indicate the tones. But when we see Mandarin transliterated it is almost always without those signs, and then the pedagogical value of the system is irretrievably lost.
2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6373 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 78 of 121 08 August 2011 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Native speakers and lingua franca are two different things.
English will remain the world's lingua franca for business, science, and private concerns for many more years to come. We don't need to think about English's dominance waning much before 2100. Remember, even with the fall of Rome, Latin stuck around for a long time, and this time English is much more wide-spread as a second language and therefore practical and entrenched in everything such as business and science that it's here to stay. I am a China bull. The 21st century is the century of China. There's a lot of money to be made in the rise of China. I'll be one of the first businessmen with good Chinese. ($_$) Edited by zerothinking on 08 August 2011 at 3:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7016 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 79 of 121 08 August 2011 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I've just removed a few comments which were purely political and had nothing to do with language learning.
Please refrain from doing so in future or this thread, which, in my opinion, has a very weak link to language learning, will be closed. Thank you. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6035 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 80 of 121 08 August 2011 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Characters are the nicest thing about Chinese, imho. Stripping them could actually make the language less popular, because Pinyin and other romanization systems are so ugly. Edited by Sennin on 08 August 2011 at 5:53pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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