The new world order: China is now Germany’s largest trading partner

Bar Sinister

Bar Sinister

Executive Branch Member
Jan 17, 2010
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White_Unifier said:
I have a number of friends or family in Canada alone who speak French but not English or neither French nor English. I also have friends abroad who speak neither. I think the reason you get the impression everyone speaks English is because you yourself speak only English.

Non-English forums proliferate online. As for culture, the Chinese film, book, and music industries can easily compete against English cultural content both in quantity and quality. There is no need to know English to access much cultural content.

I have lived in central Quebec and can tell you that most Quebecer's couldn't speak English to save their lives. Though I work in the private sector, I have needed to interact with Federal officials both at work and on my personal time for various reasons. On too many iccasions, due to a French-speaking official needing to write in English for one reason or another, I have read too many documents written in such broken English that they were partly undecipherable! Shameful, really. And this is the truth however difficult it may be to deny.

In China too, I found that most Chinese, even among the educated classes, couldn't speak English. A knowledge of English was usually a specialization limited to English majors.

Most Chinese in Canada speak at least some form of broken English, but that is because they could simply not have immigrated otherwise.

Even in India, statistically only around 4% of the population knows English well.
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Note that I did not say that everyone speaks English. I said that it is the modern lingua franca. Historically there have been several examples of such a language. In the ancient world Greek was the universal language of scholars and the well-educated. Later this distinction switched to Latin, a language that was widely taught and spoken for almost a thousand years. After that the lingua franca actually became French, when France dominated the European continent. In the middle of the 19th Century the switch to English began. This accelerated with the rise of the British Empire and the United States. Today there is no other language that rivals it and I don't see any other that is likely to take its place. Mandarin is a possibility, but that language is currently spoken as a national language only in one nation and the Chinese language lacks the flexibility of English due to the way it is written.
 
White_Unifier

White_Unifier

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Feb 21, 2017
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Bar Sinister said:
Note that I did not say that everyone speaks English. I said that it is the modern lingua franca. Historically there have been several examples of such a language. In the ancient world Greek was the universal language of scholars and the well-educated. Later this distinction switched to Latin, a language that was widely taught and spoken for almost a thousand years. After that the lingua franca actually became French, when France dominated the European continent. In the middle of the 19th Century the switch to English began. This accelerated with the rise of the British Empire and the United States. Today there is no other language that rivals it and I don't see any other that is likely to take its place. Mandarin is a possibility, but that language is currently spoken as a national language only in one nation and the Chinese language lacks the flexibility of English due to the way it is written.
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What do you mean by 'flexibility?' If you mean expressiveness, they're both equally expressive, Chinese possibly even more so, though debatable so.

If you mean 'precise,' neither belongs to the list of grammatically precise language, which makes neither an ideal candidate for writing international language contracts.

If you mean 'easy to learn,' Chinese might be even more difficult than English due to the characters. But the proliferation of exceptions to the rules and chaotic spelling rules in English make English among the more difficult languages too. This prevents English from truly becoming a language of the people and so relegating it to a language of the most educated classes in much of the world. That was true of previous classes too.

For a true lingua franca of the people, we'd need an international auxiliary language.

As an interesting side note, Lingua Franca (a historical pidgin language made up of French, Arabic and other languages used for commerce would probably have been fairly easy to learn even for the less educated merchant class. Indonesian evolved out of a trade pidgin too and most Indonesians speak it as a common second language.

In China too. I communicated with Koreans, Russians, Mongolians and others in Chinese and they usually spoke little English too.
 
Bar Sinister

Bar Sinister

Executive Branch Member
Jan 17, 2010
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Edmonton
White_Unifier said:
What do you mean by 'flexibility?' If you mean expressiveness, they're both equally expressive, Chinese possibly even more so, though debatable so.

If you mean 'precise,' neither belongs to the list of grammatically precise language, which makes neither an ideal candidate for writing international language contracts.

If you mean 'easy to learn,' Chinese might be even more difficult than English due to the characters. But the proliferation of exceptions to the rules and chaotic spelling rules in English make English among the more difficult languages too. This prevents English from truly becoming a language of the people and so relegating it to a language of the most educated classes in much of the world. That was true of previous classes too.

For a true lingua franca of the people, we'd need an international auxiliary language.

As an interesting side note, Lingua Franca (a historical pidgin language made up of French, Arabic and other languages used for commerce would probably have been fairly easy to learn even for the less educated merchant class. Indonesian evolved out of a trade pidgin too and most Indonesians speak it as a common second language.

In China too. I communicated with Koreans, Russians, Mongolians and others in Chinese and they usually spoke little English too.
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By flexibility I mean the written component of the language. English is phonetic and therefore only 26 symbols have to be learned. Chinese requires the memorizing of thousands of characters, which for most of the world's population is a bit too much effort. It is very unlikely that most non-Chinese are going to be convinced to learn so complex a system when there is a much easier system available.
 
White_Unifier

White_Unifier

Senate Member
Feb 21, 2017
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Bar Sinister said:
By flexibility I mean the written component of the language. English is phonetic and therefore only 26 symbols have to be learned. Chinese requires the memorizing of thousands of characters, which for most of the world's population is a bit too much effort. It is very unlikely that most non-Chinese are going to be convinced to learn so complex a system when there is a much easier system available.
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https://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/35562310.pdf


According to the link above, English orthography is the most difficult of those of any major European orthography as it is at least three times more difficult than those of Finnish, German, and Greek. English orthography is far from being phonetic. English orthography is probably just as many times as difficult as Esperanto orthography as Chinese orthography is as English. Where Chinese lacks in orthography though, it compensates for in grammar. Unlike English grammar that is loaded with hundreds if not thousands of exceptions to the rules (just think of the myriad equivalents to swim, swam and swum or goose, geese and mouse and mice, etc. along with dialect variants such as two mathematical values for the English word "billion" and different dialectical meanings for 'corn' and 'elevator,' along with differing prefixes such as ir-, in-, im-, and un- all meaning the same thing but not being interchangeable for each word! and inconsistent masculines and feminines (such as bull and cow or hog and sow as opposed to simply using a consistent masculine or feminine prefix or suffix to distinguish between them, etc. etc. etc. ), spoken Chinese has has no more than a couple dozen, and that only in the formal language. In the informal language, it has two!

Overall, as a person who knows both languages well, I'd say Chinese is only a little more difficult to learn than English.
 
petros

petros

The Central Scrutinizer
Nov 21, 2008
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Not at all. You can have unlimited demand but without willing bodies there is limited supply.

It's already begun.

India is going to cause serious issues for China.
 
Bar Sinister

Bar Sinister

Executive Branch Member
Jan 17, 2010
8,252
19
38
Edmonton
White_Unifier said:
https://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/35562310.pdf


According to the link above, English orthography is the most difficult of those of any major European orthography as it is at least three times more difficult than those of Finnish, German, and Greek. English orthography is far from being phonetic. English orthography is probably just as many times as difficult as Esperanto orthography as Chinese orthography is as English. Where Chinese lacks in orthography though, it compensates for in grammar. Unlike English grammar that is loaded with hundreds if not thousands of exceptions to the rules (just think of the myriad equivalents to swim, swam and swum or goose, geese and mouse and mice, etc. along with dialect variants such as two mathematical values for the English word "billion" and different dialectical meanings for 'corn' and 'elevator,' along with differing prefixes such as ir-, in-, im-, and un- all meaning the same thing but not being interchangeable for each word! and inconsistent masculines and feminines (such as bull and cow or hog and sow as opposed to simply using a consistent masculine or feminine prefix or suffix to distinguish between them, etc. etc. etc. ), spoken Chinese has has no more than a couple dozen, and that only in the formal language. In the informal language, it has two!

Overall, as a person who knows both languages well, I'd say Chinese is only a little more difficult to learn than English.
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I would say that a language like Chinese that requires the memorization of thousands of characters and is tonal to boot is going to have a hard time gaining acceptance as a lingua franca. English already holds that position and history tells us that once a system is in place and gaining in scope it is difficult to change. As for the idiosyncracies in English most are easy to fix with a few changes in spelling. English is an evolving language as is evidenced by trying to read Shakespeare. Not only that, English is highly flexible regarding things like word order. Even when spoken incorrectly English is still quite understandable. You seem to favour Chinese, but try getting Latin Americans, Europeans, or Africans to accept it over English. It simply is not going to happen.
 
C

Curious Cdn

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Feb 22, 2015
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Bar Sinister said:
I would say that a language like Chinese that requires the memorization of thousands of characters and is tonal to boot is going to have a hard time gaining acceptance as a lingua franca. English already holds that position and history tells us that once a system is in place and gaining in scope it is difficult to change. As for the idiosyncracies in English most are easy to fix with a few changes in spelling. English is an evolving language as is evidenced by trying to read Shakespeare. Not only that, English is highly flexible regarding things like word order. Even when spoken incorrectly English is still quite understandable. You seem to favour Chinese, but try getting Latin Americans, Europeans, or Africans to accept it over English. It simply is not going to happen.
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It's true. Pictographic written languages are so difficult and complex to learn that they limit their users to relatively small vocabularies. English is open ended. Anything can be English. We borrow words from other languages and invent new ones, continuously. There is no other language like English on Earth.
 
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