Its main advantage is that you can use the same writing system with different languages, but it’s not like it’s ever going to be used with English or Spanish, so that’s not something that benefits it much as a world language.
The cons of the written language far outweigh the pros. It can’t be denied that it takes far longer to learn than anything else.
I've been exposed to the Chinese writing system via Japanese, who basically adopted it and made it their own, even perfected it in some ways (e.g. stroke order discipline and SKIP method dictionaries).
It's true the writing system doesn't make it ideal for a global lingua franca, but one of the main advantages I appreciate about it is its ability to disambiguate common strings.
In the Latin+Hindu-Arabic numeral world, we tend to argue about the best way to write dates, everything from 99/9/19 to 2037.04.01 to 4/1 or 13/5/2003 to 5/15/2019. The ISO published a standard, people more or less try to follow it, but in common usage it is still fairly ambiguous.
Without knowing any Chinese or Japanese though, you can probably figure out what this means: 2018年04月05日 or 2018年4月5日
Personally I find this to be beautiful in its simplicity. We tend to use a separator anyway, dots or slashes or dashes or what have you, but add one kanji as a suffix and nobody will argue about whether 4/5/2018 is April 5th or May 4th because 日 (once you've learned what it means) will clearly mark the day and 月 will clearly mark the month.
You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second.
I wouldn't say all of written Chinese would make for a good lingua franca, but a limited subset seeing more use globally would be very cool.
>Without knowing any Chinese or Japanese though, you can probably figure out what this means: 2018年04月05日 or 2018年4月5日
I would disagree. Until you clarified below, the characters behind the numbers had no meaning and it could have been May or April with equal probability to me, considering I do not know whether Asian culture, or to be specific Chinese, prefers month or day first.
>You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second.
Or simply use the ISO standard, which I do and I will assume that people I communicate with understand ISO and parse it correctly. If they don't it's not my problem.
>I would disagree. Until you clarified below, the characters behind the numbers had no meaning and it could have been May or April with equal probability to me, considering I do not know whether Asian culture, or to be specific Chinese, prefers month or day first.
That's not the parent's point though -- if you know the characters, the meaning is immediate. Whereas 2018/02/04 remains opaque.
I actually never considered the astronomical symbols, that would work too. Not sure I would use emoji though, I mean, at least with Chinese writing it is still writing and once you know how, they're trivial to write, and in the case of year/day/month, about as trivial as any letter of the alphabet.
There's actually a recent precedent for this. The "@" symbol was almost completely unused prior to the late 90's. Email saved it from extinction, but now Twitter and other services have made it a universally understood named-person-entity indicator (which English never had before).
The 2nd and 3rd hanzi/kanji they used were quite literally the words for "moon" and "sun" (at least in Japanese, where they also mean "month" and "day").
> You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second.
About 1.5B people give or take already use or are familiar with this standard (Chinese ideographs, not my lame Latin spin on it), so we still only have n standards. This is more about picking one and extending its usage to other locales.
for one thing it's very economical spatially, something you'll quickly appreciate if you ever do any work (e.g. concept-mapping) where it's nice to be able to see and keep track of like 200 items on the screen at the same time. (a more homespun example is if you'd like to put a large number of meaningful words into one row (like your browser's bookmark bar))
also, it can be read horizontally AND vertically without needing to disassemble the graphemes or rotating your head 90 degrees. good luck doing that with english!
It's not horrible, but it just takes too long to learn as an auxiliary language. Just as the most powerful software usually loses market share to the easiest.
English is far from the easiest though. It's one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to learn. The grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary is too inconsistent and large.
Spanish is a much easier language. It has clear pronunciation rules, a more limited latin-based vocabulary and few grammar exceptions.
> It's one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to learn.
It's really not that hard. The sheer amount of media available in English makes it easier to learn than the languages where you have to specifically seek out texts written by native speakers. The fact that it's very analytic [1] is also helpful. I found Spanish harder because the numerous verb conjugations are too difficult to remember. My native language's conjugations are even harder, but luckily I've been learning it since I was a baby.
>The sheer amount of media available in English makes it easier to learn than the languages where you have to specifically seek out texts written by native speakers
It seems that way because you only look or notice English content.
Because it's often the best content available for any given topic. If I had any reason to specifically seek out Spanish, French, German content I'd probably be a little better at these.
The rich never deserve the benefit of the doubt; if they need their side of the story told, they can, and do, pay for it to be told as sympathetically and skillfully as possible. We are only to look on with as much discernment as possible.
They would. Listen closely to how you and your friends tell stories next time. Race and gender are almost always used to describe people. "My landlord, who's a black guy, <STORY DETAIL THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING BLACK OR BEING A MAN>"
>Race and gender are almost always used to describe people. "My landlord, who's a black guy, <STORY DETAIL THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING BLACK OR BEING A MAN>"
I don't refer to people primarily by their race, and I don't recall my friends doing so. While I don't deny that sort of conversation happens, it's probably not as idiomatic as you seem to believe.
I'm sure you can understand how easily a stereotype like that can fail when applied to a country as populous and diverse as the US.
I live in Pittsburgh. The air is clean now and the water is clear - but there's constant reminders that it wasn't always this way. Although most of the historic buildings were cleaned of soot, a few chose to keep some parts sooty and black as a reminder of what once was - a great example is the Mellon Institute just a few blocks from my work (https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mellon-institute-columns).
It did take Pittsburgh a long time to start fixing its environmental issues, and it took the total collapse of the steel industry to fully clear the air. Even back when I came here (~2011) people had an impression of Pittsburgh as a polluted, industrial hell-hole - I'm so glad that it wasn't the case when I came.
The left image is, amazingly, a daytime shot - the sun is visible in the top-left corner. The smog was so bad on that day ("Black Tuesday", November 1939) that a camera essentially could not capture any detail _in broad daylight_.
Well, tell me why I wouldn't believe it. I don't have an hour to spare.
I lived in a communist dictatorship when I was young and pollution was definitely worse than the democratic country I migrated to. And while the general voting populace in america is much less environmental than I would hope them to be, it seems to me that once pollution becomes overwhelming and its health effects obvious and impossible to ignore, the general public usually does something about it.
In America it was the extreme smog and the acid rain that caused a backlash. But China got much much worse than America before there was an attempt to stop pollution, and the environmentalism was brought on mostly after the Beijing Olympics. I.e., it was the result of the reaction of foreigners to the mass pollution not Chinese citizens.
I still think China would be less polluted had it been a democratic country.
So from a sample size of one, you thoroughly concluded that this was because of democracy vs dictatorship. Just to offset that for you, India is a democracy with pollution even worse than China (although conveniently not often discussed in western media).
The conclusion you came to that China is trying to curb pollution "mostly" because of foreigners visiting during the Beijing Olympics, again do you honestly believe that?
You don't think the CCP, even being one of those "communist dictatorships", cares at all about lowered life expectancy across its population? Why did the CCP lift most of its people out of severe poverty over the last 20 years? What evil agenda was it trying to achieve then?
It is thousand times better than getting shot in the street like dogs. It is this mentality which encourages 'strong' leaders who screw the general public left right and center.
Just a few
- world class manufacturing techniques
- world class drone technology
- world class civil engineering (high speed rail, bridges)
- world class super computers
Haha don't reach for Orwellian buzzwords so quickly =P. A lot of successful Chinese tech companies don't succeed just because competitors were banned. Even when Google was in China, Baidu catered specifically to local needs whereas Google just paratrooper dropped their product in. Baidu was more successful. As for Wechat, given how Facebook messenger has been shamelessly copying Wechat features for years, I highly doubt Wechat was at danger of losing marketshare to Facebook.
Baidu won out because of porn, technically illegal in china. It used to be that almost every image search in baidu, no matter how innocent, would lead to a bunch of naked pictures. Google of course, not being a chinese company, would never have gotten away with that. Baidu is otherwise a horrible search engine for anything productivity related.
That wechat would have won over Facebook is completely hypothetical given that they weren’t allowed to compete. Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube are dominating in china’s backyard, including newly opened internet markets like Cambodia and Myanmar.
Now you know how Chinese people feel when they read any articles written by white men about China, or when they go eat at one of those asian fusion abominations :)
