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Given the fact that German had a shot, I'm surprised the author expects English to remain the global language. The number of native speakers is small compared t
by Eridrus 11y ago
Given the fact that German had a shot, I'm surprised the author expects English to remain the global language. The number of native speakers is small compared to Mandarin and as China modernizes it would be surprising if economic gravity didn't shift in that direction.
Is the difficulty of Chinese writing enough to prevent it from becoming a global language?
- undersuit 11y agoI think English's status as the current global language will be enough to stop Chinese from becoming the global language. You're looking at a situation where 5/6 of the world learns 3 languages, English, Chinese, and their native language(as the transition will not happen instantaneously) or a world where everyone learns English and their native language.
- hencq 11y agoThe number of native speakers for English might be smaller, but I think crucially it's spoken in a lot of different countries already, especially if you take English as a second language into account. This is anecdotal, but in my experience people from different non-English speaking countries will often use English to talk to each other. Of course that might change as China increases its clout, but I think that change might be much slower than China's economic growth rate.
- sliverstorm 11y agoThe other one I wonder about is Chinese typing. Alphabet systems, with only a few building blocks and many permutations, always seemed more suited to computers than character systems.
- mikeash 11y agoThis is not really a problem anymore. You type Chinese these days by typing it phonetically (in Pinyin using Roman letters, of course) and the computer figures out what characters you intend, with some help from the typist. It's not the most elegant thing in the world, but it works fine.
- civilian 11y agoThat is a great question. I've emailed your post to linguafranca@ in hopes that they answer it with a blog post. I just got back from a three-week vacation in China and I still don't feel informed enough to know the answer to that. There are a couple forms of pinyin, where you can write chinese words in latin script. For example, "Wo Shi Mei Guo Ren" is "I am an American." (literal translation: "I am beautiful land people".) But most Chinese don't know pinyin, and don't make efforts to use it as an alternative.
- douche 11y agoI'm really not sure which way this could end up shaking out. English has some bizarre spellings, due in no small part to the huge percentage of loan-words it has vacuumed up from all over the world. On the other hand, if you can speak it, and know the basics of how the phonemes translate to print, you can generally make yourself understood - it mite not be kompleetlee korrect allways, but thars a lot of error tolarenz. On the other hand, Mandarin script is abstract enough that you can conceivably use it to transliterate all sorts of languages. Historically, non-Chinese languages, like Manchu, Mongolian, Turkic, Korean, and Japanese have been written using Chinese characters. Not to mention its use as a written lingua franca in the pre-modern period for all of the more-or-less incompatible regional Chinese dialects. You do have to know thousands of characters for the ideas that you want to express, rather than the few dozen letters and letter combinations that English uses. I think as long as English-speaking entertainment is dominant (Hollywood, the music industry, television), English is going to continue to grow.
- Eridrus 11y agoHow does grammar carry over from non-Chinese languages to Mandarin script? It feels like it could feel stilted if the grammar was sufficiently different.