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Cool, let's standardise on Mandarin. What? You can't speak it? Well stop wasting your time maintaining the english version of the internet. You see how discrim
by mpeg 10y ago
Cool, let's standardise on Mandarin. What? You can't speak it? Well stop wasting your time maintaining the english version of the internet.
You see how discriminatory that sounds? That's the reason there's not a single global language for the internet or otherwise.
- ArtDev 10y agoThe common language of the world should be Indonesian. Currently the world language is English though. Learning other languages is not difficult. There is no reason to not learn a new a language.
- Karunamon 10y agoThis isn't about discrimination or other trendy buzzwords, just practicality. English, for better or worse, is the standard language of the wider Internet, not to mention many professional fields.
- izacus 10y agoIn the western hemisphere perhaps.
- ArtDev 10y agoIncorrect. More people speak English in India than any other country in the world. English is the global language (for now), like it or not.
- izacus 10y agoWhile your nitpick is technically correct, we were talking about the language of the internet. Where chinese pretty much dwarfs english.
- morgante 10y ago> Where chinese pretty much dwarfs english. Do you have any evidence to back that claim? There are lots of native Chinese speakers, but remember that English is the most popular second language in the world.
- pluma 10y agoTo be fair, Mandarin is simply not a very practical language, especially in terms of its writing system. Arguably Korean would be an improvement on Latin as far as writing goes, though.
- MichaelGG 10y agoHangul is neat and quick to learn and arguably better. Though from a practicality standpoint, I think English is easier to get going on low-tech interfaces. With no IME required, you can do char-by-char typing with zero ambiguity.
- MichaelGG 10y agoIt's funny, weren't Chinese languages rather fragmented not so long ago[1]? So it would seem that uniting on a single language was rather useful to them. I know people that work in some indigenous areas in an other country and sometimes from one village to the next, they'll have trouble understanding. There is no benefit to them, just loss. Same reason when intl orgs come in and push teaching children in their indigenous language (for e.g. math), some push back because they know there's little value in using a language no one else does. 1: Wiki says: Some 54% of speakers of Mandarin dialects could understand the standard language in the early 1950s, rising to 91% in 1984. Nationally, the proportion understanding the standard rose from 41% to 90% over the same period.
- gbear605 10y agoAs a native English speaker who only speaks a little German, if everyone agreed that the world should switch over to Mandarin and standardize on it, I would be fine with it. In my opinion, having a standardized language is very important. There are a number of different groups online that I'm interested in, but due to language barriers, I can't be part of them. Could I learn all those different languages? Yes, but in my opinion it wouldn't be worth the effort.