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Chinese will rule the World Wide Web | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 81 of 121 09 August 2011 at 4:47am | IP Logged | |||||
True, I was probably too close to anthropomorphizing there. There is no inherent reason the Mandarin community can't switch, but I really doubt they would. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5957 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 83 of 121 09 August 2011 at 5:49am | IP Logged | |||||
Hopefully you were not too close to anthropomorphizing: " attributing human characteristics (or characteristics assumed to belong only to humans) to non-human animals..."!! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 84 of 121 09 August 2011 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
I can imagine a niche community of intellectuals reverting to using characters for literature and calligraphy. But it would take some kind of revolution for the masses to go back to it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4866 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 86 of 121 10 August 2011 at 12:04am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't see how it's an advantage to bundle so many distinct semantic concepts into a single symbol. Doesn't that make it impossible for Chinese to have the same expressive precision of English or Spanish? What you seem to be implying is that English could gain that same edge by discarding all verb tenses. How does throwing away a useful grammatical tool give a language an edge? As for writing, the Chinese may, in fact dominate the economy of the future, but it's certainly not going to happen unless and until they scrap their ridiculous writing system for some kind of alphabetic system. --gary 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Mandira Triglot Newbie Norway Joined 4875 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, German Studies: Mandarin | Message 87 of 121 10 August 2011 at 1:40am | IP Logged | |||||
I wouldn't hold my breath. The PRC government once aimed to replace the characters with pinyin as the official writing system, but decided in the end that it wasn't such a good idea after all. Personally I believe that if Chinese should become more widely learnt among foreigners, perhaps even a lingua franca; Chinese learners are likely to write in pinyin among each other, both as a result of tecnical limitations and in order to reach a public not literate using hanzi. Such a development would of course make pinyin more prevalent. 1 person has 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 88 of 121 10 August 2011 at 3:52am | IP Logged | |||||
You seem to be under the false assumption that "expressive precision" is a key component of a lingua franca. There's a reason why phonetically simpler Mandarin and the grammatically simpler Indonesian had such success at becoming lingua francas of their respective multilingual nations. Moreover, Chinese can be incredibly expressive, but it achieves this idiomatically rather than grammatically. As for being "precise", I'm assuming you mean "concise", because any language used correctly will inevitably be precise. And with respect to being concise, it's well-known that written Chinese takes far less space than English to express the same content. Their "ridiculous writing system" has unified over one billion people with a history of cultural and linguistic diversity akin to that of modern-day Europe, and it has persisted for well over two millennia. Considering the European languages using the Latin alphabet have done nothing but perpetually splinter apart from each other throughout the ages, perhaps there's something to be appreciated about the enduring and unifying force of the Chinese writing system, no? 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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