I don’t speak Chinese fluently but this sounds like total BS to me. Chinese can express thoughts as complex as any other language and I can’t see how it cannot write them. The written language is just a recording of the spoken language. Or are you saying that some things which can be thought and said in Chinese cannot be written in Chinese. It makes no sense.
In my opinion, Chinese is a little different. Because the majority of words are compound words, there is a sort of inherent sense of metaphor. It’s not just that words have multiple meanings. They have multiple meanings in a different way than English words do. It’s a whole different sense. I have no idea what this would mean in the world of logic, but I don’t think we should downplay the differences.
Anyway, nobody has mentioned the important thing- the Chinese aren’t particularly interested in you learning Chinese. China sees it’s language as a big part of their culture and history- maybe even one of the defining things that makes someone Chinese. And frankly they find the idea of foreigners speaking it a little odd and even uncomfortable.
When I bust out my Mandarin, I don’t really get the pleased praise that I usually get when using the native language in a foreign country. And when I start talking in the local dialect, it positively freaks people out. And the number one thing I hear yelled out to me on the streets is not "foreigner’ or whatever- it’s “She doesn’t understand.” (Which of course, I do. Makes me crazy.) The place has some deep running ideas about culture, language, country and foreigners. It’s all a little complicated, but you aren’t likely to see them making an effort to spread the Chinese language any time soon.
For example, there are foreign teachers who have lived here for years who can do little more than order beer in Mandarin. Nobody thinks this is unusual and people rarely tell them that they ought to study Chinese. It’s what they expect- and this is a big part about why there is such a huge, huge, huge push for people to learn English. I’d say within a decade, almost all college graduates and most young people in general will be able to speak English well.
I’m firmly in the NEVER camp.
The Latin –> French –> English changes were within the same script and lots of cognates and in a time were “international” languages were not of real impact for more than 5% of the population.
Chinese has different script, no cognates, it’s tonal … NO WAY.
Great article by a proffesor who lives in China a learnt Chinese on the how difficult Chinese is.
The article is frightening …
Even if every language can express every concept, some languages can express some concepts more cleanly and easily than others. It would be easier, for instance, to write about relativity in Latin than in English, since Latin uses the same word for “where” and “when”, concepts which are very closely tied together in relativity. I don’t know enough Chinese to say specifically, but it’s not at all unreasonable that some scientific concepts might be harder to express in Chinese.
I am not sure that this would make it easier to explain the concept of relativity for someone who does not know it, i.e. for someone who does make a difference between “where” and “when” in daily life (everybody).
That’s what I was going to say. Learning the alphabet is the really really easy part - you’ve got it down pat in a week or two. IMO, the difficult part is the same as in Latin and German : effing declensions.
I suppose he means linear. That is to say, the syntax of an English sentence is somewhat fixed : subject, verb, object. If you switch the position of the words around, the phrase doesn’t mean the same thing at all, if it even means anything. E.g. : “the English sentence of a syntax is somewhat fixed”.
As opposed to, say, Latin, in which the word order is for the most part irrelevant thanks to the thrice cursed effing declensions on every single word. If I’m not mistaken though, Mandarin has a fairly rudimentary grammar and is very contextual, so word order would definitely matter.
I do think **mswas **got things wrong though : just because Chinese ideograms represent whole words or concepts rather than individual sounds or syllables doesn’t mean anything when it comes to expressing scientific ideas, or any ideas for that matter. It’s just a different writing convention.
All right, a different, absurdly complex convention.
One thing people fail to understand, and this is something I learned by working with researchers at the University of Chicago, was just how competitive they are.
To be sure and to be fair, I never saw a researcher who didn’t have a deep dedication to his cause and he/she was concerned for humanity. But everyone of them had a EGO that could not be believed. They all wanted to be the next Jonas Salk, you know there research will be a discovery that puts their name on the map.
I found few cared about the money (Most of them are well paid anyway, though not like millionaires) but they wanted that fame.
With that comes publishing in a format or formats that will reach the greatest audience
Is it not the case that there are a lot more words in spoken Chinese than there are symbols in the written language, so that the same symbol gets used for many quite different words, and you have to guess what the right interpretation is by context (like homographs in English, but a lot more common)? I could see that leading to problems for precise written communication: something that might be quite clear in spoken Chinese could be thoroughly ambiguous when written down, and you might have to express yourself in a different, and probably wordier way, to make yourself clear on paper.
I don’t know that that is enough to prevent Chinese taking over in a few generations though.
Is this supposed to be a generalization about Chinese scientists, scientists in general, or academic researchers in general?
You really believe the Chinese are confused when they read Chinese? You really believe this?
Another issue is computers and their importance to any sort of modern science. Last I heard, it’s still easier to type in an alphabetic language than in a word-character language, and most programming languages bear at least a superficial resemblance to English.
You cannot be serious. This is just silly. It’s easier to type in English than in Chinese? Really? By how much? How would that impede writing scientific papers? They seem to ge doing OK writing everything I have seen. They manage to make web pages by the millions and express all kinds of thoughts there, like “buy our shit, you’ll like it”, why exactly would they have any more trouble creating scientific papers?
Why are papers written in English and not in Spanish which has easier spelling?
Most programming languages bear at least a superficial resemblance to English. So? Does that save even 1% of the effort in learning general programming and then a language?
I find these ideas so silly. The Chinese are running a country with over a billion peope over there. They are building huge works, dams, railways, highways, etc. and they seem to manage quite OK. I suppose all that requires writing specs, contracts, etc. I cannot see how anyone can think they would have any difficulty writting scientific papers.
And, again, if precission and simplicity is paramount then papers would be written in Spanish which is closely related to Latin, all vowels have clear and distinct sounds, spelling is a breeze …
I make no predictions regarding when papers may be written in Chinese but I assure you many are being written in Chinese right now because they are for Chinese consumption. For international consumption the fact is that, for now, more western people speak (some) English than (some) Chinese and that Chinese students do learn English quite well.
It’s significantly easier to type in english than in chinese and the entire programming universe is still done in english. I’m not aware of a single, significant programming language that doesn’t use english keywords. Here’s a recent blog post about the phenomena.
The argument isn’t that it would be complex for Chinese scientists to write their papers in Chinese, but for the rest of the world to do so.
And from what I see, it *is *very complex to type ideograms, even more so than writing them. On a Western, Arab or Cyrillic keyboard, what you type is what you get. But since they don’t make keyboards with 25k+ keys, Japanese & Chinese typing relies heavily on automatic completion. If it is anything close to the utter annoyance of predictive typing on cellphones…yeah. Especially since the completion seems to make about as much intuitive sense as the kanjis themselves, which is to say : not one lick.
And if the amusing article linked earlier is true, Chinese do have trouble writing in Chinese, why wouldn’t they have trouble typing it ?
There are several different things being discussed here. One is that Chinese speech or writing is somehow not suited for scientific work. This is absolute nonsense. Any language is suited for expressing anything which can be expressed in any other language. Of course Spanish is better suited for talking about bullfighting because they already have a vocabulary and concepts but that is not because of the language. Once you learn the vocabulary and concepts in English you can talk about bullfighting in English just as well as you can in Spanish.
Another thing is whether typing in Chinese (knowing Chinese, obviously) is more difficult (and I suppose it means slower) than typing in English. I am not certain this is true at all. I have spent quite long times at the Internet cafes in China watching the kids chatting online and they seem to type just fine for their communication needs. They did not seem slow or confused at all.
But, again, let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that typing in Chinese is 10% slower or even 20% slower than typing in English. So what? it just means that typing the paper will take a bit longer. So what?
Suppose a hospital is going to do some tests to see whether mice who smoke and watch “Survivor” become obese. They will spend countless hours doing all the work with the mice noting results, seeing what brand of cigarrettes the mice prefer etc. Typing the results in the final work is a tiny part of the whole thing and the fact that it takes a bit longer means close to nothing.
You could make the same argument with the English language and the American system of units when compared to the Spanish language, which is much easier to spell, and the decimal metric system which is much easier to use. Well, in spite of those two significant drawbacks it seems to me American Universities are ahead of universities in South America. So it seems to me whatever advantage they have with the language and the units is not enough to put them ahead of American universities.
Likewise I am sure any longer time it takes to type Chinese, supposing it exists which I seriously doubt, is not going to affect the writing of scientific papers by Chinese scientists.
Another different thing is whether western scientists would learn Chinese and the answer right now is no way. I suppose if one day Chinese had the place in the world which English has now then it would be different but we have no idea if that might happen or when. Not any time soon.
I know that you just said this for comparison, but anyway: as far as I know, even American scientists use the metric system. Science is all metric.
The point is that learning Chinese is objectively much harder to learn and use than other languages. A psuedo alphabet with 5000+ characters is more difficult to use than a <30 character alphabet. Tonal languages are objectively more difficult to learn than non-tonal languages. Yes, Chinese people manage to live with it, and there’s no real way to measure the handicap it causes. However, it is easy to see the handicap when you talk about foreign language students. A native hindi, russian, arabic, french, german, etc. speaker is going to learn English much quicker and easier than they are Chinese, if they could ever get fluent enough in Chinese to write a scientific paper.
China is going to have to offer some immense and unique advantage to justify the effort required for everyone to learn Chinese. I don’t see any possibility for that occurring. Yes, it may have the greatest number of native speakers, but we are getting to the point, if we aren’t already there, where the number of fluent English speakers outnumbers the native Chinese speakers.
According to The New College Latin and English Dictionary, the word for “when” is quando and the word for “where” is ubi.
“Ubi” can have both meanings, at least according to the Latin teachers I had lo, these many years ago.