Is it really all that certain that China is about to take over the world? Maybe it was just dumb rednecks talking out of their asses at the time, but I remember people expressing similar feelings about Japan in the '80s, and that obviously never happened.
The discussion is not about China taking over the world. The discussion is about the world will ever need to switch to English in Science, voluntarily, just to keep participating in first class science.
according to wiki it was to make Chinese easier to learn and to drive standard pronunciation. In 1950 heck even 1980, most of China spoke local dialects. Mandarin usage as the linga franca really took off from the 1990’s.
In 1954, the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) created a Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language. This committee developed Hanyu pinyin based upon several preexisting systems: (Gwoyeu Romatzyh of 1928, Latinxua Sin Wenz of 1931, and the diacritic markings from zhuyin).[6] The main force behind pinyin was Zhou Youguang.[7] Zhou was working in a New York bank when he decided to return to China to help rebuild the country after the Korean War. He became an economics professor in Shanghai and was assigned[8] to help the development of a new romanization system.
A first draft was published on February 12, 1956. The first edition of Hanyu pinyin was approved and adopted at the Fifth Session of the 1st National People’s Congress on February 11, 1958. It was then introduced to primary schools as a way to teach Standard Mandarin pronunciation and used to improve the literacy rate among adults. In 2001, the Chinese Government issued the National Common Language Law, providing a legal basis for applying pinyin.[9]
He remained *married *to a Russian his entire life. Obviously, she subverted him from the revolution with her physical charms and made him (and by extension the rebellious largest island in China) just a puppet of the imperialist Russian bear. Or are you just a lap dog of the imperialist Americans? Discuss amongst yourselves. 
Well, you knew what I meant. I obviously wasn’t talking about the Chinese army marching down 5th Avenue. A cultural, economic, and linguistic “takeover” similar to what the US did in the 20th century is what everyone’s buzzing about.
People buzz like bees over bullshit.
China has no chance in hell, at this point, of becoming the next economic superpower because it doesn’t have a demand-fueled consumerist economy. It’s been using America that, but that only works while China is appropriately small. The Chinese themselves are gaga about saving and not spending their money.
That may yet change. So watch for that. But at this point it ain’t looking good.
You are quite misinformed about China. Internal demand is huge and a very substantial part of the economy. I know Americans like to think China is making a living off American scraps but it just ain’t so.
China is building infrastructure like crazy. Chinese people are buying stuff like crazy. China is the #1 market for cell phones. The biggest telecomm companies are Chinese. Contrary to what many people believe, there is probably not a single American phone company among the top ten worldwide while there are two or three Chinese. The market for appliances and electronics is probably bigger than America’s.
I work in the telecomm field and I can tell you their internal demand is just huge. Every time our production was delayed because the production lines were busy with another product it was always products for the Chinese market not for export.
For the last ten years I keep reading predictions about how China is somehow going to hit a glass ceiling and will not go above that. But it never happens.
I think China is well on its way to becoming a world class economic power. Unless they would do something really stuid or crazy (and you never know, nobody would have predicted America following GWB) I think the path they are following is very good and will lead to China’s economy surpassing that of America in the next 25~30 years.
Note that they are not only building shit, like Japan before them, they are designing and developing and learning. When I was a kid Japanese products were considered inferior and people laughed at the notion that they could ever compete with Germany or America. And while we were laughing at them the Japanese beat us at our own game. I expect pretty much the same to happen with China. And I think it is good and to be welcomed, not feared. They will be a huge market in both supply and demand. And that is good.
I generally have the impression that it is considered to be a big deal, an achievement, that country X is consuming stuff country Y produces, even if country X is not giving much back. No, the achievement is that country Y is producing stuff.
In the (purely fictional ) case where country Y does not get real goods back, but paper (treasury bonds), country Y will be more than happy to stop delivering goods to country X as soon as it has created its internal market - and this will happen.
You know, lately I’ve been thinking about the Suez Crisis, where Britain lost its superpower status and in some people’s eyes became more or less a toady of the US:
:dubious: Hmmm . . .
I have to second that this is really, really not true. China right now feels like a mix of a giant shopping mall and a huge construction site. Even my own small city is shoulder-to-shoulder shoppers all day long and resembles a forest of under-construction skyscrapers… You’ve never seen so much money flying around.
This is part of the reason why I am arguing that Chinese script is not a particularly efficient mode of communication. You have to invest much more effort in this language than in any other, and part of the reason is that you are learning one spoken language and one (insanely difficult) written language. Contrast this with an alphabetical approach - even one (like English) that requires abundant knowledge of irregularities in pronunciation.
THAT is why the Chinese invented Pinyin: to make things simpler for the population and boost the appallingly low literacy rates, rather than continue using an absurdly difficult script that was purposefully difficult so as to present high entry barriers to those who sought to learn it.
On the contrary, although it should not matter, I will restate here (again) that I **do **have some knowledge of the language. But I do not need to be an expert in a field in order to point out something about it. Everyone in the GD forums should know this by now.
If you’re going to try and argue against my thesis - which is that compared to alphabetical non-tonal languages Chinese is not as efficient a form of communication and presents difficulties for disciplines in the sciences and technology - you have an uphill struggle ahead of you and some heavy citing to do.
China’s literacy rate is fairly good - 93% according to this UNESCO source. The problem arises when you consider that “literacy” in Chinese must necessarily involve a standard number of characters (nobody alive knows all Chinese characters), whereas in alphabetical languages you can read and write as soon as you master a couple dozen building blocks and basic pronunciation rules. That is a difference of a few days (or months if you are a really slow learner) versus a lifetime. Which is more efficient?
The problem is that literacy in China is not an exact science. If I only know 400 characters (compare this to a couple dozen letters in the alphabet!) I cannot claim to be literate. What I found is that statistics measure literacy as the ability to write and recognize 1,500 characters for a rural person, and 2,000 for an urban dweller.
So one additional problem with Chinese script is that you have different standards of literacy: you have the basic peasant literacy (1,500 characters), basic office worker literacy (2,000 characters), “real” basic literacy (3,000 to 5,000 characters), full newspaper literacy (6,000 to 7,000 characters), dictionary literacy (something like 8,500 characters), and varying amounts above that for fields of specialized knowledge, such as the sciences. Balancing the national need for literacy with the use of Chinese script required the government to lowering the literacy bar to a level that is not considered sufficient for daily life, and that would not qualify as literate in most other countries.
Again, this is why Chinese luminaries starting from the 1920s if not earlier have wanted to reform the language into something more suitable for the modern age. I think the stuff you wrote about the personal preferences of Mao are a jest and thus I won’t address them.
Please go back and read what I wrote. Then if you have a problem with it take up the relevant citations and address them. You are either misunderstanding me or setting up a nice little straw man.
This is simply not true. Have you tried a Chinese typewriter lately, or are you relying on the advances of computer/mobile technology that make an incredibly difficult mode of communication more manageable? Because your above statement is true only if you use Pinyin and are a very good typist, or if you are really, **really **good at typing using computer programs that help you with input in Simplified. A fairer comparison than the one alluded vaguely in your quote will usually show that typing in Chinese is slower that typing in any alphabetical script. For obvious reasons (one key stroke versus multiple key strokes and selection from a menu).
There is no standard input format, and one is not likely to emerge. You can choose a pronunciation-based input method, which lowers your maximum speed (this includes the highly popular Pinyin method). Or you can opt for several structure-based input methods, which are based on the stroke structure of Chinese characters (these are much harder to learn and easier to forget, but the advantage is that you don’t need to know the character’s pronunciation in order to input it). There are direct input reference methods that use an alphanumerical code to reference a specific character. There are also a few input methods that use a combination of pronunciation and character methods, and about which I know nothing.
To my knowledge none of the above results in the sort of speedy typing you can accomplish with minimal practice and an alphabet language keyboard (from typewriter to PC),
By the way, here is an article I came across last year that discusses a related problem being faced by users of computers and Chinese script today:
But logical and simple are not the same thing. In fact, I’d argue that languages best suited to logic are difficult and precise - Latin is the perfect example: a brutally difficult grammar, but a language that allows the kind of precision that tongues like German or Italian (themselves **highly **precise) can only approach. English is a lot easier than such languages, at the cost of a loss in precision and a reduced ability to carry meaning in any given sentence (introducing greater ambiguity). Chinese grammar is very simple and easy to learn, but this is a language that presents various acknowledged difficulties with regards to (for example) precision and abstract concepts.
Children are programmed to pick up any language at all and are not a useful example in this discussion - quite the opposite. Entry barriers to Chinese are substantial, particularly for students coming from non tonal languages (like most of them). We’ve already covered some of the difficulties involved with the fact that every word in Chinese changes meaning **completely **depending on the pitch employed by the speaker (not to mention the problems that arise from context). This is particularly confusing for students of Chinese - as I am sure you can remember, if you think back to when you were learning the language.
Plus, as mentioned, some people (including the disabled) have fundamental problems with tones that will not go away no matter how much rah-rah-rah practice-makes-perfect nonsense you chant at them.
What you say above is certainly true, however the opposite (pointed out by the poster) is also true. It really depends who you are talking to, where you are, and who you are. I have seen plenty of both. Surprisingly, there are plenty of Chinese who remain appalled at the idea of foreigners learning their language. If that foreigner happens to be Indian or black (or generally of dark skin), you have a better chance of experiencing a response that involves disdain; if you are white you have a better chance of a positive and enthusiastic response.
But I don’t wish to characterize one and a half billion people in this way; there are isolationists and bigots and ignorant louts in every population. I merely point out that the poster you are replying to had a valid point and his experience is not unheard of.
My thesis is simply that Chinese stands zero chance of supplanting English as the world’s language of science. Scientific communication in English is simply faster, easier, more efficient, and far more accessible than scientific communication in Chinese - a language that is fairly likely to undergo further reform to render it better suited to the needs of the modern age.
An addition about inputting Chinese character in a PC: I should have clarified that I meant to exclude software-assisted shortcuts from the discussion about typing speed, because I do not think it makes for a fair comparison. If you use shortcuts, you can type extremely fast, but you’re not really typing - you are relying on the computer to select the right words and phrases for you, intelligently, based on a short form you provided.
Back to the original topic - there are papers being published in Chinese. They get translated to English for international reading.
I know, because I’ve had to translate them. (I was born in Taiwan, but I grew up in the States, so I think exclusively in English unless I’m in an environment where the majority of the input I get is in Chinese.)
Let me tell you, I’ve not hated my own native tongue so much as when I’ve had to do that. Chinese grammatical construction means that you can have a hideous number of independent clauses crammed in one sentence. Plus the sentence order is different from English, so by the time I’m done with a sentence I’m damn lucky if I can capture its spirit.
When I’m translating stuff into English for my Dad (born and raised in Taiwan, teaching aerospace engineering in the States now), I always run it by him and my Mom (who taught Chinese to those crazy foreigners who want to learn it) to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
How is that unfair? Doesn’t matter what system is used, the end result is that a native speaker can input Chinese onto a computer in an efficient manner. It’s somewhere around typing speed. Picking nits about whether the input method is not writing Chinese or if you’re comparing an old style mechanical Chinese typewriter is irrelevant.
It seems like just one more machine-assisted performance boost of the many that are required to bring up efficiency when typing in Chinese, so I can see why you would object. But of the various technological solutions that are used to speed up typing in Chinese, I would omit this particular one in a fair comparison of typing speeds.
If we used the same technology for alphabetical languages I am sure we would see a speed increase there too. For example, if your word processor recognizes short hand input and fleshes it out for you in complete words and sentences, your **typing **speed has not really increased, because the computer is just doing much of the work for you. An extension of this argument is if you were to use speech recognition software: “typing” speed can go through the roof with such solutions.
Unless there are other people in the thread which are far more familiar with the subject than you are, and that seems to be the case here. So, as an outsider I tend to accept their opinon, not yours.
I speak a bit of Russian and Arabic and Arabic is harder (it is based on letters). I would imagine Burmese and Khemer to be difficult too.
Abe: I don’t think anyone questions that learning written Chinese is more diffcult than well just about anything. Beyond that, it is not proven nor inherently clear that written Chinese is less efficient for Chinese people, especially using computers.
As far as logical languages, Chinese is certainly one of the most logical. It’s one of the big pluses on the language side. It’s also quite precise. Not quite sure where you’re coming up with the acqusation that Chinese is not logical?
Also, those cites on literacy may be accurate, but such a rediculously low bar that I’ve never heard them in my 25 years of studying Chinese.
And I need a reputable cite that pinyin was invented to replace written characters. Heck, even McArthur tried that for Japanese and eventually settled on just over a 1,000 key characters (with multiple readings so really a few thousand). College educated Japanese know a few thousand characters.
The claim that pinyin was invented to replace Chinese traditional characters is just, how can I say, true and false, unverifiable, …
Things are generally not invented with one only specific purpose. Thirty years ago most people did not understand why anybody would need a home computer or what use it might be. When geeks were asked this question the answers were something along the lines of “well, you could keep all your kitchen recipes in your computer”. Nobody had any idea. Computers were invented and later many new uses were found. It turns out the principal use is communications, which nobody really foresaw at that time.
Wikipedia has a good summary on the history and development of hanyu pinyin.
I read somewhere that the Soviets collaborated in the development of Hanyu Pinyin.
Pinyin was mainly invented in order to standardise the different romanization systems for Chinese use (not for foreign use). I am sure many intended it to eventually replace Chinese script but evidently there was no immediate plan to do so. So yes, many may have thought it might eventually replace Chinese characters but no, there was no definite steps taken towards that end.
I think it is really impossible to say “why” it was invented. Everybody thought it would be useful but each one might have a different vision of where the future would lead.
Lonely Planet, a source I consider as reliable as any guy you might meet on the street, says “The original idea was to do away with characters completely and just use pinyin. However tradition dies hard and the idea has gradually been abandoned.” I would need much more evidence before believing that was the agreed ultimate goal from the get go but I have no doubt many of its promoters believed that could happen.
The above is equivocation unsupported by argument or evidence. If you don’t provide more “meat” I can’t address it, since I’ve already provided several arguments and supporting citations that are contradictory to your claim.
This is at best an oversimplification of my previous arguments that ignores just about everything I have posted on the subject. I’m not accusing Chinese of being an “illogical” language, any more than I was accusing China of being a backwards country just because they use a script that is highly inefficient compared to an alphabet system. I simply noted some counterpoints to some of your claims: a language with simple grammar is not necessarily a “logical” one.
Accepted, but anecdotes do not appear to be very relevant in this case.
Another one? Here is an interesting paper on the subject presented to the Chinese Amaerican Librarians Association (CALA) - it is 12 years old and thus does not cover many of the advances in computer technology and the Internet we’ve seen in the last decade, but it addresses some of the problems:
There is also an interesting (but somewhat dated, owing to advances in IT) closing about the state and future of Chinese:
Which, though 12 years out of date, matches quite well with some of the other (more recent) cites I have already provided in earlier posts, especially the concern that digital use of the easier and more efficient Pinyin is causing a general degradation in knowledge of Chinese characters.
Now, even the Wikipedia page on Pinyin - which you quoted earlier without - clearly states the following:
My emphasis. So here we have a proposed script (or sets of scripts) that is substantially more efficient than the original Chinese logographic scripts. We have several linguists, scholars, and luminaries in general cited as being concerned about the difficulty and inefficiency of logographic Chinese. We have the introduction of Pinyin in an attempt to boost low national literacy rates and standardize Chinese language by **replacing **the old script with a more efficient phonetic system.
Also see the points made by Sailor in the post just above this one. I do not agree with the conclusion that claims of original purpose for Pinyin are necessarily unverifiable - see the cites - but he makes good points, especially about the likelihood of there being differences of vision and expectations for Pinyin among its creators, implementers, and proponents.