To be honest, I laughed at what Koxinga said too. It’s because your post comes across as incredibly naive.
You say
Why English? Why switch? Computers have been around for quite some time now and nobody is switching. Why do you think they’ll suddenly start now?
The English writing system is not the most efficient writing system that could ever be devised by god or man. I hope we can agree on that point. OK, so given that, I ask you why haven’t people who communicate in English adopted a better, more efficient writing system? Dig deep within yourself and I’m sure you’ll find the answer. When you have the answer, you’ll have answered your own thread question.
Why English? Because it’s basically the international language of business, science, technology, etc., not because of any inherent superiority of English-speaking people. I chose English because it’s truly a world language at this point, and fairly important if you want to do any kind of business internationally. Also, computers as they are used today haven’t been around for long at all - when did people start using the worldwide web and e-mail and all the rest? Even in the U.S. it wasn’t de riguer (see? I’m no chauvinist) until the mid-'90s.
No writing system is perfect, but it depends on what you’re going for. English has the most words by far, which I tend to see as a positive thing, although I could see why others don’t, and it also avoids the Romance language issue of assigning gender to words, which seems unnecessarily complicated. Perhaps there are other writing systems that bypass such difficulties and have large vocabularies and are much easier to use - I don’t know, and it’s one reason I started the thread. But koxinga’s post didn’t imply I was naive - it implied I was some kind of jingoistic xenophobe. This thread was very informative and interesting until he (?) came in and crapped all over it.
I think it still is informative and interesting. Now it’s just slightly funnier.
Anyways, going back to the whole autocompletion of Chinese - are there different sets of software for different dialects? Or do enough people know Mandarin (in addition to their first dialect) that that’s a standard? I wonder what effect that sort of standardization of pronunciation will have on spoken Chinese.
Finally, with regards to learning English for computer use, I recall hearing somewhere (my post is my cite) that there weren’t any programming languages that weren’t at least based on English (even if some of them are pretty borked up), which is an intriguing notion - that there’s a subset of people throughout the world who have their own cant, and can at least understand each others’ code, even if they can’t have a conversation.
Yes, yes - I’m a big pussy because I didn’t find your insult funny. It surely had nothing to do with its supercilious judgmental tone and the fact that it came across a more of a, you know, personal insult than a joke, or that it totally misrepresented what I said to make it sound like I was calling a culture backwards and stupid. Also, it wasn’t really funny. Your follow-ups have been more humorous, though still dickish.
It really doesn’t seem that bad. It would take more time to read, but the archaic spellings and the like are still comprehensible.
I specifically mentioned the Canterbury Tales earlier because while most of my high school study of it used modern version, we studied the prologue and one of the tales in the original Middle English.
It wouldn’t be completely incomprehensible to a modern Japanese speaker, but they wouldn’t understand enough to be able to justifiably claim to be able to read for meaning. They might be able to tell that “on the 3rd day of the 5th year, the emperor sent someone somewhere to do something” or the like, but no more. But there are a lot of characters there that aren’t used in Modern Japanese, and characters are used for grammatical purposes in classical Chinese (and the faux-Chinese kanbun that was used for formal Japanese writing until the 19th Century) that would be unknowable by a Japanese who hasn’t specifically studied those usages. If a Japanese saw 都 in a sentence and thought “oh, that means capital or city,” they’d be wrong if it was being used to mean “and,” for example.
To confirm this I showed the page to some Japanese friends who stated that they had no idea what was said.
Yep, there are different sets of software, not only for the different dialects, but also for the different phoneticizations, which aren’t standard, either (although my understanding is that Pinyin is pretty common).
And again, phonetic autocompletion isn’t the only typing method. There are several methods that are based on the structure of the character (what the strokes are, what order they are written in, where they are within the character). Some of these also use autocompletion, some don’t. With these methods, someone can type characters they’ve never heard and have only seen written.
What a coincidence–English Lit was also my major. I find it curious that someone in that field of study would find Shakespeare so challenging, especially in contrast to the more difficult, but still comprehensible Middle English of Chaucer.
Try making an argument that works. You were trying to say that older forms of Japanese would be as or more comprehensible than older forms of English. I was challenging your example. See cckerberos’s reply–they understood what I was getting at. In fact, they even did exactly what I suggested you do, and showed it to some Japanese friends, who confirmed that they couldn’t understand it.
Pardon me while I pause to laugh hysterically at the idea of favoring English to avoid things that are “unnecessarily complicated.”
Same goes for math and science–two people in the same field of study could understand each other’s equations etc. even if they didn’t speak the same language. I don’t really think that a programming language or script counts as a “cant,” though–you can’t really use it to communicate with another person who doesn’t share an actual language with you. (A minor in CompSci and having programmed in something like seven languages is **my **cite. :p)
Fair enough as far as usage - as I said, I could see why you could make a case for just about any language, but it’s really a side issue. The question asked was “Why would they learn English (if they were going to switch to an alphabet) rather than some other language?”, the implication (again) being to me that I chose English for reasons of cultural pride or something equally dubious. The fact is, as I said, English is pretty much the international tongue used in dealings of any import whatsoever - Cecil even touched on this in a column. That’s just indisputable truth, and has nothing to do with any kind of “English is superior because I speak it” dipshit accusations.
My only experience with pre-modern languages is Spanish. If you know the orthographic shift, it is intelligible. I have read Guaman Poma with little problem.
I have also spoken with a member of the Rhodes (Greece) Jewish community. They were expelled from Spain in 1492 and continued to speak Spanish. I do not know how contaminated the Spanish was by modern, but it was easily comprehended. BTW The community is almost non-existent as they were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.
It wasn’t a completely crazy question. Although by this point the problems with using non-alphabetic writing systems have been largely overcome it was clearly an issue in the past. My Ph.D research deals with US-Japan relations in the 1950’s, which is really not all that long ago. But while all of the period US government documents I’ve collected have been typed, about 80% of the Japanese government documents are handwritten. This represents a great inefficiency both in the amount of time spent writing everything out, but also in terms of the time spent making copies (since I imagine mimeograph technology could not be used.)
(BTW, an early Japanese minister of education actually suggested switching languages to English. He was not taken seriously by either his Japanese superiors or his American academic contacts.)
And I don’t disagree with you. I just took note of a particular point I found amusing. Deep breaths, woodstockbirdybird–not everyone is out to get you.
Yes, Chaucer is more challenging. No question about it. But even Shakespeare is not a walk in the park for an average reader and it’s not completely understandable for modern readers. Simple questions like the oft misunderstood, “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” are a challenge. You’re understating the difficulty to make a point. Which is, I suppose what I’m also guilty of.
Yes, but I get that kind of crap from Japanese all the time if they don’t understand every single little nuance of something. They look at a page of English and say, 英語分からない！without attempting to extract any meaning from it. Simply ask them about the meaning of the words, and then ask them to guess at the gaps and they usually can perform a credible translation without any actual outside help, but if you just show it to them and ask what it means they’ll claim they don’t understand at all.
They probably looked at it, had flashbacks to 漢文 classes and refused to even bother. But whatever, I’m not going to bother arguing about it anymore because I know I was stretching the point a bit in the first place.
I get the impression that in Japan, it’s somehow a tad disreputable–or at least people fear it will be disreputable–to take to foreign languages too easily. As if making the extra effort to understand and become more fluent in English will only end up with you becoming than fully Japanese in the eyes of your peers. Do you get that sense at all?
(Almost reminds me of Chris Rock’s criticism – and these are his words, not mine – that black people are dissuaded from pursuing book learning and higher education for fear of ostracism, somehow.)
The closest thing I can think of is students I had who hid the fact that they had very good English because they’d spent time growing up abroad. But for the average Japanese, knowing English because you studied hard is to be admired. This is especially true among adults.
I think the Japanese “I don’t understand it perfectly” = “I don’t understand it” thinking towards English is more a product of the Japanese educational system’s black and white, right and wrong approach to learning. As well as a heightened fear of making mistakes.
I’m not saying it’s not more difficult to comprehend than modern English, simply that older forms of English are more comprehensible to native speakers of English than older forms of Japanese to native speakers of Japanese. Setting aside the changes in the spoken language (lexical and morpho-syntactic), which happened in both, we have to look at the changes to the written languages. (Spoken language != written language–they’re two different animals.) English had a bunch of spelling changes and a few letter shifts (e.g., the long s, which looks like an f), while the Japanese writing system underwent a major overhaul (from being written entirely in kanji to being written in a combination of kanji and kana).
The point is that **cckerberos **actually tried it. If you think the results were contaminated, you’re more than welcome to replicate the experiment with your own test group.
WOW! Man, you should contact the press - everyone else in the world thinks that none of Shakespeare’s original manuscripts survive.
You might have read some of the first folio - copies, at least, unless you were extraordinarily lucky and had access to the actual folio. That was handwritten, so yes, it’s harder to read than typewritten English. Once it’s typed, Shakespeare is very easy to read. You can’t really compare handwritten texts to typed texts. The texts we use now are not actually edited, standardised or updated to any great degree; changing f to s is the only common change.
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