8 ms·

Chinese engineers clearly have no problems building specific, technical things; just like Chinese surgeons have no problems carrying out specific, technical sur

by gyomu 8mo ago

Chinese engineers clearly have no problems building specific, technical things; just like Chinese surgeons have no problems carrying out specific, technical surgeries, etc. So how is the language "strictly less technical and specific"? Can you give specific and technical examples?

tsunamifury 8mo ago
Mandarin is a courtly language full of back out vagueness and high context construction. This is simply a product of the society. It’s not a judgement of right or wrong it simply just is. Rote Surgery is not a good example compared to say writing a PRD about an unknown feature. I am in no way saying Chinese people cannot do these things. I am saying in mandarin it is less specific and more circumspect ways of getting there. I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.
- gyomu 8mo ago
  > I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response. I'm not sure why you're getting so defensive; I indeed don't speak Chinese, hence why I'm asking a question. A claim like "Chinese as a language is less technical and specific than English and slows progress" seems pretty grand; and if Chinese people failed to launch satellites in orbit or do brain surgery you could point to that; but they don't seem to be held back by their language when it comes to making specific, technical achievements, so I'm curious to hear actual, concrete details or examples about what makes Chinese a "less technical and specific" language. It sounds like your answer is "it simply just is, because it's a courtly language" - which is not a very satisfying answer, intellectually speaking.
  - oreally 8mo ago
    The "slows progress" part has some bits of truth in it. This is coming from a from-young bilingual chinese/english speaker. Chinese is harder to learn, ceteris paribus, all other things being equal (especially regarding exposure). English has 26 characters you can put in a buttoned keyboard. You recurse upon these letters to create new words & meanings. Chinese has what, a thousand? And you'd have to create a stroke system first if you don't have hanyu pinyin. Recursing Chinese characters has problems too, the chinese word for 'good', when split to it's sub-characters represent different meanings. There were also some Chinese historians that specifically pointed out the chinese language was part of the cause of their worst slices of history despite the chinese having invented gunpowder and whatnot first. They also noted chinese was confined to the elite, who made the language even more complex (in contrast to other civilizations), during certain dynastic periods. Today, the chinese government are trying to simplify the language. I get that there is pride in people's native languages, but they'll repeat the same mistakes if they don't recognize the weaknesses. It's a bitter pill to swallow.
- abeppu 8mo ago
  I don't speak Mandarin but is this not an issue of style rather than the language itself? English can be courtly or poetic or abstruse but that's a matter of the speaker making a bunch of choices. I can't help but think of "Yes Minister" and Humphrey Appleby working quite skillfully to communicate in a way that ensured he would not be understood. Do Mandarin speakers not also have such a range of choices to be clear or not?
  - RestartKernel 8mo ago
    Maybe it's a matter of code switching? I've read that some Japanese teams prefer English for practical reasons, since a shared second language prevents anyone from getting bogged down in formalities. That is not to say Japanese is unable to be formulated with just as much precision.
- jimbokun 8mo ago
  You are talking about culture, not the language.
- numpad0 8mo ago
  Say what you want about Sapir-Whorf, but it's just the reality that translation of anything to anything is generally gibberish. It's just a fact. The more literal it gets, the less coherent it will be. A complete word-for-word "translation" is just garbage out. Was that Chinese text actually being ambiguous, or was that translations you were given being nonsensical/having so much context errors? The latter is kind of an expected behavior for translated technical texts, and that has nothing to do with whether Chinese are illogical bunches(why even bother contacting if that were ever the case...)
  - tsunamifury 8mo ago
    This is only true when one has a near autistic level of specificity required to make sense of anything.
    - numpad0 8mo ago
      But you were, sort of, accusing Chinese language as being an illogical and primitive amateur language. That's an extraordinary claim, with such absurd notions as "rote surgery" thrown as a side. It's more likely that you were just confused about what a language is than such claim being valid. Chinese textbooks for University quantum physics are written in Chinese. They don't like, switch to English after high school or something. And they do in fact do brain surgeries and fly manned rockets. The language is obviously fine as it is. The likely core of the problem you had encountered is that, languages are algorithms of thoughts, contrary to whatever Chomsky guy might have told you, and a language is only coherent within itself, and you weren't aware of that. A piece of Chinese text taken out of context and words displaced with that English used in similar manners, don't necessarily make sense. Rest assured you'd be far from alone with conflating lack of coherency of someone not from US trying to speak English with their lack of IQ, that's a common sight, but that doesn't mean a language you don't speak is inferior to yours.
      - tsunamifury 8mo ago
        I think you're assuming a lot of nonsense here out of some sort of insecurity or obsession with your pet theory. Chinese is different, more contextual and metaphorical, requiring more 'fuzzy' linguistics to say the same thing. Thats its... thats all. And I challenge anyone who works across china and US like I do to not agree. Beyond that you're just going off on your own made up missions of stupidity. Really re-read your train of thought and think about how wandering nonsense it becomes with assumed things I didn't say.
noirscape 8mo ago
It's not related to Chinese in specific, but in civilian air traffic, the lingua franca is specifically English[0]. The reason for this is because other languages leave too much room for interpretation. One incident not mentioned in that page that's worth bringing up is Korean Air Flight 801; the crew recognized an issue with the instruments quite a bit before the crash, but because the flight crew essentially was too polite in notifying the captain of the issue, the captain instead asserted authority with incomplete information, leading to the plane crashing[1]. Language specificity and cultural encoding in those languages can have a pretty major impact on its clarity, especially in critical situation. Speaking a secondary language instead can avoid that sort of thing simply because being a non-native speaker, you'll be a good deal more blunt in that language. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801
- gwd 8mo ago
  But that's more psychological than linguistic: The Korean language could certainly express, "we're about to crash"; and a foreigner in that cockpit would certainly have found a way to be more direct. It's much easier to break social restrictions in another language.
- _jss 8mo ago
  Malcolm Gladwell's description of that accident and amplification is simplistic and not very accurate. There were many errors made that caused that accident, including ATC failing to follow protocol. English is the language of aviation because in 1951 the countries with the most living pilots and aircraft spoke English. It is not because of any trait particular to English.
- numpad0 8mo ago
  It's just that pilots have no capacity left to be fluent in every languages everywhere. You don't avoid ambiguity speaking in the second language in a critical situation, you just incur significant responsiveness plus bandwidth penalty. There are few recordings of aircraft emergencies over Japan on YouTube. Two obvious things in those recordings are that local pilots drop pretense of speaking Engurish in almost any non-normal conditions, and that local ATCs are dangerously useless outside of normal conditions. There's nothing visibly helpful from using English in there.

by gyomu 8mo ago

tsunamifury 8mo ago

Mandarin is a courtly language full of back out vagueness and high context construction. This is simply a product of the society. It’s not a judgement of right or wrong it simply just is. Rote Surgery is not a good example compared to say writing a PRD about an unknown feature. I am in no way saying Chinese people cannot do these things. I am saying in mandarin it is less specific and more circumspect ways of getting there. I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.

gyomu 8mo ago
> I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response. I'm not sure why you're getting so defensive; I indeed don't speak Chinese, hence why I'm asking a question. A claim like "Chinese as a language is less technical and specific than English and slows progress" seems pretty grand; and if Chinese people failed to launch satellites in orbit or do brain surgery you could point to that; but they don't seem to be held back by their language when it comes to making specific, technical achievements, so I'm curious to hear actual, concrete details or examples about what makes Chinese a "less technical and specific" language. It sounds like your answer is "it simply just is, because it's a courtly language" - which is not a very satisfying answer, intellectually speaking.
- oreally 8mo ago
  The "slows progress" part has some bits of truth in it. This is coming from a from-young bilingual chinese/english speaker. Chinese is harder to learn, ceteris paribus, all other things being equal (especially regarding exposure). English has 26 characters you can put in a buttoned keyboard. You recurse upon these letters to create new words & meanings. Chinese has what, a thousand? And you'd have to create a stroke system first if you don't have hanyu pinyin. Recursing Chinese characters has problems too, the chinese word for 'good', when split to it's sub-characters represent different meanings. There were also some Chinese historians that specifically pointed out the chinese language was part of the cause of their worst slices of history despite the chinese having invented gunpowder and whatnot first. They also noted chinese was confined to the elite, who made the language even more complex (in contrast to other civilizations), during certain dynastic periods. Today, the chinese government are trying to simplify the language. I get that there is pride in people's native languages, but they'll repeat the same mistakes if they don't recognize the weaknesses. It's a bitter pill to swallow.
abeppu 8mo ago
I don't speak Mandarin but is this not an issue of style rather than the language itself? English can be courtly or poetic or abstruse but that's a matter of the speaker making a bunch of choices. I can't help but think of "Yes Minister" and Humphrey Appleby working quite skillfully to communicate in a way that ensured he would not be understood. Do Mandarin speakers not also have such a range of choices to be clear or not?
- RestartKernel 8mo ago
  Maybe it's a matter of code switching? I've read that some Japanese teams prefer English for practical reasons, since a shared second language prevents anyone from getting bogged down in formalities. That is not to say Japanese is unable to be formulated with just as much precision.
jimbokun 8mo ago
You are talking about culture, not the language.
numpad0 8mo ago
Say what you want about Sapir-Whorf, but it's just the reality that translation of anything to anything is generally gibberish. It's just a fact. The more literal it gets, the less coherent it will be. A complete word-for-word "translation" is just garbage out. Was that Chinese text actually being ambiguous, or was that translations you were given being nonsensical/having so much context errors? The latter is kind of an expected behavior for translated technical texts, and that has nothing to do with whether Chinese are illogical bunches(why even bother contacting if that were ever the case...)
- tsunamifury 8mo ago
  This is only true when one has a near autistic level of specificity required to make sense of anything.
  - numpad0 8mo ago
    But you were, sort of, accusing Chinese language as being an illogical and primitive amateur language. That's an extraordinary claim, with such absurd notions as "rote surgery" thrown as a side. It's more likely that you were just confused about what a language is than such claim being valid. Chinese textbooks for University quantum physics are written in Chinese. They don't like, switch to English after high school or something. And they do in fact do brain surgeries and fly manned rockets. The language is obviously fine as it is. The likely core of the problem you had encountered is that, languages are algorithms of thoughts, contrary to whatever Chomsky guy might have told you, and a language is only coherent within itself, and you weren't aware of that. A piece of Chinese text taken out of context and words displaced with that English used in similar manners, don't necessarily make sense. Rest assured you'd be far from alone with conflating lack of coherency of someone not from US trying to speak English with their lack of IQ, that's a common sight, but that doesn't mean a language you don't speak is inferior to yours.
    - tsunamifury 8mo ago
      I think you're assuming a lot of nonsense here out of some sort of insecurity or obsession with your pet theory. Chinese is different, more contextual and metaphorical, requiring more 'fuzzy' linguistics to say the same thing. Thats its... thats all. And I challenge anyone who works across china and US like I do to not agree. Beyond that you're just going off on your own made up missions of stupidity. Really re-read your train of thought and think about how wandering nonsense it becomes with assumed things I didn't say.

noirscape 8mo ago

It's not related to Chinese in specific, but in civilian air traffic, the lingua franca is specifically English[0]. The reason for this is because other languages leave too much room for interpretation. One incident not mentioned in that page that's worth bringing up is Korean Air Flight 801; the crew recognized an issue with the instruments quite a bit before the crash, but because the flight crew essentially was too polite in notifying the captain of the issue, the captain instead asserted authority with incomplete information, leading to the plane crashing[1]. Language specificity and cultural encoding in those languages can have a pretty major impact on its clarity, especially in critical situation. Speaking a secondary language instead can avoid that sort of thing simply because being a non-native speaker, you'll be a good deal more blunt in that language. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801

gwd 8mo ago
But that's more psychological than linguistic: The Korean language could certainly express, "we're about to crash"; and a foreigner in that cockpit would certainly have found a way to be more direct. It's much easier to break social restrictions in another language.
_jss 8mo ago
Malcolm Gladwell's description of that accident and amplification is simplistic and not very accurate. There were many errors made that caused that accident, including ATC failing to follow protocol. English is the language of aviation because in 1951 the countries with the most living pilots and aircraft spoke English. It is not because of any trait particular to English.
numpad0 8mo ago
It's just that pilots have no capacity left to be fluent in every languages everywhere. You don't avoid ambiguity speaking in the second language in a critical situation, you just incur significant responsiveness plus bandwidth penalty. There are few recordings of aircraft emergencies over Japan on YouTube. Two obvious things in those recordings are that local pilots drop pretense of speaking Engurish in almost any non-normal conditions, and that local ATCs are dangerously useless outside of normal conditions. There's nothing visibly helpful from using English in there.