5 ms·

I wonder if they will keep printing rubbish like this when the language of science becomes Chinese, which is not too far off.

by veave 3y ago

cscurmudgeon 3y ago
At the point you will see harmony championed over diversity.
DFHippie 3y ago
Why is it rubbish? It is useful for there to be some lingua franca. There are arguments for why English is a good candidate: - already widely spoken - economically important - simple word morphology - no grammatical gender - an alphabetic writing system that is relatively easy to learn There are reasons why it is a bad candidate: - terrible spelling for an alphabetic writing system - definite articles, which confuse speakers of languages which lack them - arguable unnecessary tense and aspect distinctions - obligatory gender in animate pronouns In any case, it's what we've got. But it is also true that communicating professionally in a language you learned for that purpose imposes a burden that native speakers don't face. If you find it boring to read attempts to quantify this, maybe this article isn't for you.
- JadeNB 3y ago
  Thanks for this considered response! > obligatory gender in animate pronouns While it's just one in a long list of things, I'll point out that singular "they" is available (and has a long history) for people wishing to use non-gendered, animate pronouns. (I have also heard "it", but, while everyone's mileage will differ, my brain has a much harder time getting over the difficulty with reading "it" as animate than it does the difficulty with reading "they" as singular.)
- zer8k 3y ago
  > There are reasons why it is a bad candidate: - terrible spelling for an alphabetic writing system - definite articles, which confuse speakers of languages which lack them - arguable unnecessary tense and aspect distinctions - obligatory gender in animate pronouns The only way to fix this is to make the lingua franca a constructed language. I'm not exactly against the idea of Esperanto being the lowest common denominator. However, there's this implication in your post and the article that English being the wrong language is some thinly veiled imperialism, racism, or something. Science is not that way. If there was an easier language to communicate to an audience with they'd use that. The "base" language of English is far, far simpler than other languages. Gendered pronouns are available in almost every language and English is one of the only languages where you can replace them with non-gendered pronouns if you so choose. In fact, I wrote this entire post without using any gendered language. This would be impossible in nearly any other widely spoken language. It would be easier if the frothing at the mouth pro-DEI-at-all-costs people would just say what they mean. Then the argument could be addressed correctly - English replaced Latin because it was easier and evolving. Chinese is the only language that would replace it based on paper-origin/language ratio and Chinese is an order of magnitude or more complicated. Even just speaking about the alphabet it's something like 100x larger.
  - nradov 3y ago
    Esperanto is mostly based on Indo-European group languages. Compared to English, Esperanto is only marginally easier to learn for people who grew up communicating in languages from other groups like Arabic or Chinese. If we wanted a more neutral language ideally suited to scientific discourse then Lojban would be the "logical" choice. But of course in the real world it's totally impractical. https://mw.lojban.org/ https://mw.lojban.org/
bagacrap 3y ago
Why do you think this? There are vastly more English speakers than Mandarin worldwide [1] and China is now only the second most populous country, overtaken by India. English is an official language of India and while not pervasively spoken overall, is pervasively spoken by the educated classes. I think Mandarin will have a hard time increasing its sphere of influence, despite what cyberpunk authors may have predicted 30 years ago. [1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/#people-and-society https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/#peop...
- veave 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ihateolives 3y ago
    [citation needed]
  - sonicshadow 3y ago
    [flagged]
- dirtyid 3y ago
  TLDR is PRC has enough state capacity to produce and harness enough scientific talent to compete with global English in science, but likely not to replace it. PRC academic system that heavily focuses on science is spitting out educated classes that can in aggregate rival the size (and increasingly quality) of the English tertiary network. The current STEM production rate is ~5M or OECD combined. People mocked at PRC academic paper mills a few years ago, but now PRC talent is topping science and innovation indexes (controlled for quality), that's the natural outcome of exploiting talent at PRC scale. Project trend to 2050 (past 26 years of new births already locked in) and PRC can feasibly hammer out 100M+ talent in just STEM, and most importantly, increasingly be able to retain talent without the best being brain drained. Effect going forward is that PRC is going to snowball the generation of high impact scientific research and it will increasingly be written in mandarin - PRC removed mandatory English education. PRC scientific base will likely be large enough to rival English RoW, the dynamic will be more the PRC science sphere will be less inclined to integrate with the Anglo sphere. Especially if translation tech improves. IMO the mandarin science ecosystem will be fine competing if not leading in her own bubble. If anything, the PRC might prefer the gatekeeping science behind language as a competitive advantage. Global science will splinter and mandarin science will be it's own pole. Shortcoming of India elite demographic dividend argument is, western academic institutes have limited capacity to absorb Indian talent, who let’s be frank, is replacing current cohort or PRC talent due to geopolitics which will make Indian brain drain problem worse and PRC talent retention better. English proficiency among brain drained elites will make spinning up indigenous Indian S&T at scale difficult, which India herself has a poor track record of exploiting. That can change with time obviously, but IMO there's something systemic happening with Indian diaspora doing well abroad for much longer than PRC diaspora but not meaningfully converting that into success for their birth country. Without India actually raising the ceiling for western academic ecosystem, you're looking at anglo and mandarin ecosystems competing closely. Unless anglos massively boost skill immigration, but that's politically difficult and the opposite is just as likely.
zer8k 3y ago
I agree with the actual point you're making. This is a thinly veiled DEI opinion article.
wl 3y ago
I'm skeptical that Chinese will ever become the international language of science as long as Hanzi is the dominant script used to write it.
- ihateolives 3y ago
  Yup, people vastly understimate the effort needed to learn Mandarin. It's not in the same ballpark by far with Spanish, French of even Russian or Greek.
nradov 3y ago
China is most likely to suffer a severe economic and societal collapse due to their demographic problems within a couple decades. At that point their scientific productivity will also decline. There is no scenario in which Chinese becomes the dominant written language for scientific discourse. https://youtu.be/kBMSZ7v3KxQ https://youtu.be/kBMSZ7v3KxQ
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
This shit only comes out in low-risk situations. If Chinese was becoming standard, they'd go back to talking about rape culture in dog parks or whatever. It's why Queer Theory is so insane - very very low stakes. (If you don't believe me, read some Gayle Rubin or the less mainstream Foucault stuff).
- Claude_Shannon 3y ago
  I don't understand what is the reason for this unrelated rant.

I wonder if they will keep printing rubbish like this when the language of science becomes Chinese, which is not too far off.

by veave 3y ago

I wonder if they will keep printing rubbish like this when the language of science becomes Chinese, which is not too far off.

cscurmudgeon 3y ago

At the point you will see harmony championed over diversity.

DFHippie 3y ago

Why is it rubbish? It is useful for there to be some lingua franca. There are arguments for why English is a good candidate: - already widely spoken - economically important - simple word morphology - no grammatical gender - an alphabetic writing system that is relatively easy to learn There are reasons why it is a bad candidate: - terrible spelling for an alphabetic writing system - definite articles, which confuse speakers of languages which lack them - arguable unnecessary tense and aspect distinctions - obligatory gender in animate pronouns In any case, it's what we've got. But it is also true that communicating professionally in a language you learned for that purpose imposes a burden that native speakers don't face. If you find it boring to read attempts to quantify this, maybe this article isn't for you.

JadeNB 3y ago
Thanks for this considered response! > obligatory gender in animate pronouns While it's just one in a long list of things, I'll point out that singular "they" is available (and has a long history) for people wishing to use non-gendered, animate pronouns. (I have also heard "it", but, while everyone's mileage will differ, my brain has a much harder time getting over the difficulty with reading "it" as animate than it does the difficulty with reading "they" as singular.)
zer8k 3y ago
> There are reasons why it is a bad candidate: - terrible spelling for an alphabetic writing system - definite articles, which confuse speakers of languages which lack them - arguable unnecessary tense and aspect distinctions - obligatory gender in animate pronouns The only way to fix this is to make the lingua franca a constructed language. I'm not exactly against the idea of Esperanto being the lowest common denominator. However, there's this implication in your post and the article that English being the wrong language is some thinly veiled imperialism, racism, or something. Science is not that way. If there was an easier language to communicate to an audience with they'd use that. The "base" language of English is far, far simpler than other languages. Gendered pronouns are available in almost every language and English is one of the only languages where you can replace them with non-gendered pronouns if you so choose. In fact, I wrote this entire post without using any gendered language. This would be impossible in nearly any other widely spoken language. It would be easier if the frothing at the mouth pro-DEI-at-all-costs people would just say what they mean. Then the argument could be addressed correctly - English replaced Latin because it was easier and evolving. Chinese is the only language that would replace it based on paper-origin/language ratio and Chinese is an order of magnitude or more complicated. Even just speaking about the alphabet it's something like 100x larger.
- nradov 3y ago
  Esperanto is mostly based on Indo-European group languages. Compared to English, Esperanto is only marginally easier to learn for people who grew up communicating in languages from other groups like Arabic or Chinese. If we wanted a more neutral language ideally suited to scientific discourse then Lojban would be the "logical" choice. But of course in the real world it's totally impractical. https://mw.lojban.org/ https://mw.lojban.org/

bagacrap 3y ago

Why do you think this? There are vastly more English speakers than Mandarin worldwide [1] and China is now only the second most populous country, overtaken by India. English is an official language of India and while not pervasively spoken overall, is pervasively spoken by the educated classes. I think Mandarin will have a hard time increasing its sphere of influence, despite what cyberpunk authors may have predicted 30 years ago. [1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/#people-and-society https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/#peop...

veave 3y ago
[flagged]
- ihateolives 3y ago
  [citation needed]
- sonicshadow 3y ago
  [flagged]
dirtyid 3y ago
TLDR is PRC has enough state capacity to produce and harness enough scientific talent to compete with global English in science, but likely not to replace it. PRC academic system that heavily focuses on science is spitting out educated classes that can in aggregate rival the size (and increasingly quality) of the English tertiary network. The current STEM production rate is ~5M or OECD combined. People mocked at PRC academic paper mills a few years ago, but now PRC talent is topping science and innovation indexes (controlled for quality), that's the natural outcome of exploiting talent at PRC scale. Project trend to 2050 (past 26 years of new births already locked in) and PRC can feasibly hammer out 100M+ talent in just STEM, and most importantly, increasingly be able to retain talent without the best being brain drained. Effect going forward is that PRC is going to snowball the generation of high impact scientific research and it will increasingly be written in mandarin - PRC removed mandatory English education. PRC scientific base will likely be large enough to rival English RoW, the dynamic will be more the PRC science sphere will be less inclined to integrate with the Anglo sphere. Especially if translation tech improves. IMO the mandarin science ecosystem will be fine competing if not leading in her own bubble. If anything, the PRC might prefer the gatekeeping science behind language as a competitive advantage. Global science will splinter and mandarin science will be it's own pole. Shortcoming of India elite demographic dividend argument is, western academic institutes have limited capacity to absorb Indian talent, who let’s be frank, is replacing current cohort or PRC talent due to geopolitics which will make Indian brain drain problem worse and PRC talent retention better. English proficiency among brain drained elites will make spinning up indigenous Indian S&T at scale difficult, which India herself has a poor track record of exploiting. That can change with time obviously, but IMO there's something systemic happening with Indian diaspora doing well abroad for much longer than PRC diaspora but not meaningfully converting that into success for their birth country. Without India actually raising the ceiling for western academic ecosystem, you're looking at anglo and mandarin ecosystems competing closely. Unless anglos massively boost skill immigration, but that's politically difficult and the opposite is just as likely.

zer8k 3y ago

I agree with the actual point you're making. This is a thinly veiled DEI opinion article.

wl 3y ago

I'm skeptical that Chinese will ever become the international language of science as long as Hanzi is the dominant script used to write it.

ihateolives 3y ago
Yup, people vastly understimate the effort needed to learn Mandarin. It's not in the same ballpark by far with Spanish, French of even Russian or Greek.

nradov 3y ago

China is most likely to suffer a severe economic and societal collapse due to their demographic problems within a couple decades. At that point their scientific productivity will also decline. There is no scenario in which Chinese becomes the dominant written language for scientific discourse. https://youtu.be/kBMSZ7v3KxQ https://youtu.be/kBMSZ7v3KxQ

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

This shit only comes out in low-risk situations. If Chinese was becoming standard, they'd go back to talking about rape culture in dog parks or whatever. It's why Queer Theory is so insane - very very low stakes. (If you don't believe me, read some Gayle Rubin or the less mainstream Foucault stuff).

Claude_Shannon 3y ago
I don't understand what is the reason for this unrelated rant.