Chinese is definitely a language–do you think all those people use telepathy or sign language to talk to one another? I think what people are trying to say is that “Chinese” is a misnomer since not everyone in China speaks Mandarin. But a lot of Chinese do, and probably a greater percentage of Chinese speak Mandarin than Indians who speak Hindi.
There’s a funny thing about these Chinese dialects. Ever see a Chinese-language broadcast on some remote channel of your cable TV. Do you notice how occasionally you will see subtitles in Chinese even though Chinese is being spoken. That’s for the benefit of Chinese who can read Chinese, but don’t know Mandarin! Incredible as it sounds, the Chinese dialects can all be written in the same language even though they sound quite different That’s a major reason why the Chinese government has not completely shifted to the phonetic way of writing Chinese in the Roman alphabet (Pinyin) even though it is easier to learn than the traditional way.
“Interested in fashion, Harmonica?”
“There were three dusters like these waiting for a train.
Inside the dusters were three men. Inside the men were
three bullets…”
–Once Upon A Time In The West
Charlie, according to professors at the University of Washington, Mandarin is still number one with 900 million native speakers. Hindi is second , Spanish is third, and English is fourth, all with about 500 million. However, English probably has considerably more non-native speakers than either Spanish or Hindi, again based on the same source. I have seen sources claiming that English has as many as 1.5 million speakers, including natives and non-natives. That seems excessive to me. This is all very difficult to calculate, and all figures given are little better than guesses. Ed’s last post is absolutely correct…many Chinese don’t speak or understand Mandarin…instead, they speak Cantonese, Hakka, Min, Wu, Xi, or Zhuang…but all of those languages, mutually incomphrensible when spoken, express themselves the same way when written. Weird, no? Well, think about numbers…352 means the same thing in all languages around the world that use Arabic numerals. The Chinese languages use the same signs to signify the same ideas, even though they’re spoken differently in Peking, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.
There was an article in the L.A. Times a couple of years ago about the government in Iceland being very protective of the language. It seems that they consider themselves the guardians of the old Norse. They really can sit down and read books written a thousand (or whatever) years ago. The national gov. was extremely peeved at Microsoft for not translating Windows into Icelandic. Apple had a translation for Mac, and was using that as a marketing tool.
What really made them mad was that the gov. wrote ms to ask for a price translate Win., and did not get a reply. They started threatening to switch over completely to Mac, IIRC. Apparently Bill’s wallet could not hear such a tiny market drop.
The article also said that they are very particular about using native words for new items. Instead of “monitor” or some sound-alike for the computer screen, they adopted an old, largely unused word that really meant something like “sheep intestine”, which is what they used to stretch over the windows before the availability of glass.
The whole thing made them sound worse than the French, and that’s hard to do.
OTOH, maybe I just don’t identify with living in a smaller country and having my culture “overrun.”
Wow, i thought the French were bad with their Snippy attitude about keeping “their language” pure. Most Countries would just take the word and just change its orthography. However, in the Philippines where theyre trying to create “pilipino” (the lingua franca of the nation), they are trying to use native words to express technological words, etc. For Gravity they took an Ilocano word that was close enough to the idea, and using the grammar rules, got things like: Gravimetrics, gravity, gravitron, etc.
Alas, one more language to add to the pile of the dead. Once a languages’ structure, usage, and existance is ruled by committee, it dies a slow painfull death. French, Icelandic, and now I hear Germany is going this route. Languages need to be able to adapt and change through the users usage, not some committee’s.
>>while contemplating the navel of the universe, I wondered, is it an innie or outie?<<
I guess if one wants to get techy Chinese is not a language, it is a group of languages, look what Websters says:
Chi•nese \chi-"nez, -"nes\ noun pl Chinese (1606)
1 a : a native or inhabitant of China
b : a person of Chinese descent
2 : a group of related languages used by the people of China that are often mutually unintelligible in their spoken form but share a single system of writing and that constitute a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family; esp : mandarin
Chinese adjective