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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 105 of 121 13 August 2011 at 4:12am | IP Logged | ||
You bring up three notable points worth being addressed. The first is that the Internet is inherently an intrinsically English medium. First off, character input is no longer limited to the Latin alphabet—there are website URLs that use Chinese characters (I believe Arabic was the first non-Latin script for which this was developed). But moreover, just because English might lurk in the architectural framework of the Internet doesn't mean this is relevant to the mainstream public. After all, most people are completely illiterate when it comes to programming languages (C++, Java, etc.) and even the omnipresent and fairly basic HTML. So the only people this situation affects are the people actually in the industry, and as a Danish fellow pointed out, engineering is no longer the fail-safe Anglophone field that most English speakers assume it is. Secondly, you mention that Chinese people actively use English on the Internet. Sorry, but I just haven't seen that to be the case. While this certainly applies to Chinese diaspora, those in the P.R.C. overwhelmingly use Chinese for everything they do on the Internet. China is unique among most countries in that its most popular websites are almost all indigenous developments. It has its own versions of YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, etc., which leads me to the third point: No one is suggesting that Chinese will one day overrun sites like YouTube, Cracked, Facebook, and Amazon. The point of all this is that the Chinese online sphere will accumulate enough demographic volume and economic activity such that it will aggregate into a sphere of the Internet comparable to the Anglophone sphere. Just as English hasn't wiped out native Polish, Vietnamese, Croatian, Turkish, and Norwegian sites, neither will the ascendency of the Chinese web presence wipe out the websites familiar to us Anglophones. Like I already said earlier in this thread, the day that Chinese finally "rules" the Internet, you probably won't even notice it, because this entire phenomenon is taking place outside the Anglophone Internet bubble. That last sentence (^up there) is probably the most crucial point of this entire concept, and it probably won't make sense to many, because they're framing the issue under a different set of assumptions—one which measures influence by the number of countries affected, rather than the number of people or the sheer aggregate value—irrespective of who it affects—of the "stock" (demographic, economic, political, etc.) invested into the language. Edited by nway on 13 August 2011 at 4:15am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4866 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 106 of 121 13 August 2011 at 4:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Perhaps the problem is with the word "dominate". Does something dominate me if I don't even notice that it exists? What if aliens from the planet Zarcon came to earth a hundred years ago and are living in vast underground cities, unnoticed by humans. And what if they have been using our Internet from the very beginning, and what if they have ten sites for every site in any human language, and what if we can't see those sites without a Zaconian keyboard (with 37 letters). Then do Zarconian sites "dominate" the Internet? To me "dominate" kind of has the implication that the thing being dominated is squashed or pushed aside.
As for Chinese ever becoming widespread, I fall back on the Darwinian principle that the language which is most adept at propagating itself in foreign environments will be the one to eventually dominate. Any alphabetic language will propagate more easily than Chinese writing for obvious reasons. So any language except Chinese is a reasonable candidate to become the planet's dominant language. An alternate hypothesis is that as fossil fuels are used up travel will become more and more expensive, global communication will become prohibitively expensive, the Internet will collapse, and all over the world various regional dialects will split into mutually incomprehensible languages and the number of distinct languages in use on the planet will grow and there never will be a dominant one. --gary 4 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 107 of 121 13 August 2011 at 5:45am | IP Logged | ||
What the... China's entire history is one of subsuming smaller cultures into its own cultural sphere. You don't seem particularly keen on Chinese history, so let me be the first to tell you that China "proper" used to be a quarter of the landmass it is today. And within that landmass, different nations spoke different languages and used their own scripts. This standardized written language not only eventually unified all these people in the northeast, but then spread southward (the region of Hong Kong and Guangdong once belonged to people who culturally would not be considered "culturally Chinese" by today's standards, and Vietnam would have been part of China had the Vietnamese people not been so resiliently defiant) and of course then spread westward across peoples from a variety of diverse and distinct cultures. The Xiongnu and countless other ancient nations no longer exist due to the propagating power of the Chinese civilization, with its written language as the primary emblem of this identity. So, in short, the notion that Chinese lacks "staying power" is simply historically not true. It ranks with English, Spanish, and Arabic at having been incredibly successful at propagating itself among peoples for whom it's not their indigenous mother tongue. I'll conclude by putting it this way: If there was a single language that gradually spread to every European nation and became the entire continent's sole lingua franca and majority native tongue—wiping out German, French, Greek, Russian—would there by any doubt that this language has—to say the least—an incredible power to propagate itself? At that level, it wouldn't matter if it was written in Braille—its existence would speak for itself. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4866 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 108 of 121 13 August 2011 at 6:22am | IP Logged | ||
And I presume all of that happened before literacy had become common, and in the absence of an alphabetic writing system against which to compete. That's rather like saying that yeast grows like crazy in a vat of corn mash therefore it will one day take over the entire world. I propose that the "vat of corn mash" in which Chinese grew and prospered was one without a viable written competitor among the masses. I have no doubt that Chinese is perfectly able to propagate as a spoken language, but that doesn't automatically mean it could propagate equally well in written form in a age of literacy. I would be interested in seeing some statistics on instances where pictographic or logographic systems have supplanted alphabetic ones. Certainly pictographs have spread into regions where NO prior writing system existed, but has a pictographic system every supplanted an alphabetic one? I don't know the answer to that. But I would bet that the simple system of writing wins out over the more complex one in the long run. You have half-convinced me that Chinese might have the same expressive power as English (although I remain somewhat skeptical of that). If that's the case then I can easily imagine a world in which spoken Chinese comes to dominate, but only with its clumsy system of writing replaced by an easier to learn alphabet or syllabary (like Kana or Hangul). My argument is not that Chinese can never dominate because of any inherent feature of the spoken language, but that Chinese, using its present system of writing, can never dominate in the presence of competition from alphabetic systems. I'll leave the last word to Moser: ( http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html ) --quote-- I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? --end quote-- --gary 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5409 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 110 of 121 13 September 2011 at 8:36am | IP Logged | ||
It certainly has STAYING power, it just doesn't have growing power. The days of massive takeoever of neighboring countries or spreading one's written language form due to the complete absence of reasonable competitors is long gone. fiziwig, your example strikes true with me as well. My Japanese girlfriend regularly forgets the meaning or use of certain kanji, and the Japanese have far less characters to worry about than the Chinese. She doesn't even care about a lot of the Kanji, she will type romaji into the computer and then afterwards search for the kanji that "looks right" amongst the available options for the romaji script. That of course begs the question as to why have the characters in the first place other than too much duplication of words using an easier alphabet ... I wouldn't be surprised if she's forgotten how to write 15% or so of the characters altogether. Edited by Sandman on 13 September 2011 at 8:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| strummer Diglot Newbie Switzerland Joined 4923 days ago 38 posts - 53 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 111 of 121 02 October 2011 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | ||
Completely agree with you, I have the same experience with my Chinese wife. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 112 of 121 02 October 2011 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||
I think this is actually the main question. I cannot but bow to nway's knowledge of Chinese culture and history. I can only dream of having that degree of insight in any culture - even my own. The reason I still can't agree with him, is that for me Mandarin would not dominate the Internet until also we in the West would find it natural to write in it - or indeed find the need to write in it. The day my daughter comes to me and says, "Mom, I need to look up something on the Internet, what is the Chinese sign for it?", that would be the day I would consider that Mandarin dominated the Internet. It is probably true that at some point there will be more activity on the Internet in Mandarin than in English, but would that constitute a domination? Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 02 October 2011 at 6:36pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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