Chinese may replace English in this century

[tanklao]

Chinese has been widely used in East Asia for thousands of years. It was supposed to be the leading global language, but an accident happened. English quite by chance took its place. Will Chinese seize the place? The answer is definitely YES! Because Chinese has many advantages over European languages including English.

Chinese, especially Chinese characters, is more stable than European languages. An average student of higher schools in China can easily read the books, say Lunyu, Laozi et al, that were written 2000 years ago But a Ph D of native England can hardly read the books their ancestor wrote 500 years ago. In China a pupil of primary school can easily read The Romance of Three Kingdoms which was written more than 600 years ago. Because Chinese is a ideographic language in which the characters are generally true to their ideas while European languages including English are phonetic languages in which the words should be principally true to their pronunciations. For hundreds of years the pronunciation changed, as a result words of English changed; but characters of Chinese remained almost the same. In the next five hundred years, God alone knows what English will become. But Chinese, I predict confidently, will not change so much, especially its writing.

Chinese is more compatible especially the writing Chinese. Some experts in the ISO (international standard organization) classify Chinese as a language family which contains Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Minnan Chinese, Wu Chinese etc. In the speaking sense it's definitely right, but in writing sense it's absolutely wrong. We should admit that that the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese is greater than that between English and German. But that is just in speaking. In writing they are almost the same. No matter what kind of Chinese you speak, you can easily communicate with others by writing, because all kinds of Chinese are compatible in the way of using Chinese characters. So Chinese should be identified as one language. But English is different. Although English is considered as one language, An American is quite hard to understand Indian English and African English. Within just 100 years of changing, Americans have difficulties to understand Indian English and African English. In another 100 years Indian English may be identified as an independent language, not English any more. So may African English, Singaporean English, and even Chinese English. But different kinds of Chinese, which underwent thousands of years of changing, are still well compatible. People in the UK have a pride of their language. "English - A global language; English - A global language!" Everyday everywhere they say this. But this is a false pride. Indians speak and write in English, but in their own English, not the global one. So do Chinese, Singaporeans and Africans.

Written Chinese is more informative. Chinese characters carry far more information than any other language. In the five official languages of the United Nation, Chinese is the most informative. According to the report by Benjamin K. Tsou in the Language Information Sciences Research Centre of City University of Hong Kong, the Entropy of Alphabets or Characters is Chinese 9.65 bits, followed by Russian 4.35 bits, then English 4.03 bits, Spanish 4.01 bits and French 3.98 bits. We can put it in another way to understand the report like this: if we use 100 pieces of paper to write a novel in English, it needs only 42 in Chinese, which is nearly 60 percent less than English. If the US uses Chinese as its office language, it will save at least half of its forest that is used to produce paper. So do computer disk and anything that is related to writing. The United States is always trying to save resources and protect the environment. One of the best ways, I suggest here, is to let Chinese become the official language, because Chinese is more informative and will save a lot of resources.

Chinese runs faster. Take memorizing times table for an example. English students take 1.5 times longer to read the table than Chinese student do, and correspondingly take 1.5 times longer to memorize it, according to the essay Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics by Yuen-Ren Chao, a Chinese American linguist. It was also found that reading Chinese is also much faster than reading English, because Chinese is an ideographic language that is very suitable for silent reading. When a Chinese student reads three books, an American student may read just read one. No wander why Chinese students of high schools get more Olympic prizes in science. When these students become a Ph. Ds, they use mainly English in their research, so their speed has been slow down greatly. If Chinese scientists translate all the scientific papers into Chinese and publish all their papers in Chinese, I believe that China will surpass the US in science very soon, because Chinese is a language that runs much faster than English. There was a case to prove it. It took US more one thousand times to invent the nuclear bomb, but it took only about 50 times for China to finish the same work independently.

Chinese is more vigorous in front of the challenge what is called the information explosion. Everyday lots of English words or terms are coined. There is going to be a vocabulary explosion of English, which really become a big challenge. Lots of new words or terms are created in Chinese as well. But this does not become a problem, because a Chinese new word typically composes of two or three characters which imply its meaning. A Chinese person can easily understand a new word which he/she has never seen. Let's take a look at the new words that the two languages have coined in the past few decades. China didn't have wine until the westerner brought it to China. In Chinese “wine” is translated as putaojiu（葡萄酒）in which putao means grape and jiu means a kind of beverage which contains alcohol. Every Chinese speaker can easily understand the meaning of putaojiu without any explanation or looking up a dictionary. Baijiu(白酒), translated to English in terms of Mandarin Pinyin, is also a kind of beverage. But it is really hard for an average English speaker to understand what baijiu is without looking it up a dictionary or getting some explanations. In the field of sciences, new term are created everyday. In English one new term in many cases means one new word. In Chinese a new term mean a combination of two or three or more characters to make a new sense. One can easily memorize a new term because the characters of the new term implys its meaning. For example, microcystin is a biological term. An average English speaker may have little idea about it, although they know that “micro” means small. Its equivalent term in Chinese is weinangzaodusu(微囊藻毒素)in which wei means tiny, nang means package, zao means algae, du means poisson, and su mean a kind of chemical. So an average Chinese speaker will perceive the term as a kind of poisonous chemical produced by a kind of algae the form of which is like a tiny package. This information is absolutely enough for every average speaker. Most of scientific terms in Chinese can be understood in this way by the average readers and speakers. For another example. I pick up 25 words or terms that are very basic in each of their fields as following (English followed by characters and Mandarin pinyin):

======================================================

tampon 棉球 mianqiu,

flask 烧瓶 shaoping,

exarticulation 脱臼 tuojiu,

nephrolith 肾结石 shenjieshi,

schizophrenia 精神分裂症 jingshenfenliezheng,

senile dementia 老年痴呆症 laonianchidaizheng,

cuboid 长方体 changfangti,

rhombicosidodecahedron 二十面体 ershimianti,

saleratus 小苏打 xiaosuda,

selenium 硒 xi,

theostat 变阻器 bianzuqi,

manostat 稳压器 wenyaqi,

sturgeon 鲟鱼 xunyu,

pheasant 野鸡 yeji,

drone 雄蜂 xiongfeng,

ozonosphere 臭氧层 chouyangceng,

troposphere 对流层 duiliuceng,

monsoon 季风 jifeng,

flute 长笛 changdi,

granite 花岗岩 huagangyan,

mutatis mutandis 作必要的变化 zuobiyaodebianhua,

epistemology 认识论 renshilun,

metaphysics 形而上学 xing'ershangxue,

bourgeoisie 中产阶级 zhongchanjieji,

proletaria 无产阶级 wuchanjieji.

========================================================

If you takethese 25 words or terms (that are from fields of medicine, mathematics, chemistry, physics, zoology, musicology, geology, meteorology, philosophy and politics) to have a test,I can bet that an average reader of English can hardly understand five of them and that an average reader of Chinese can hardly miss five of them. Obviously Chinese has more vigor to deal with the new terms of sciences. It will be only Chinese, I predict confidently, that can undertake the big challenge of information explosion we meet today.

Chinese is far simpler than English.Chinese is always considered to be the hardest language in the world. This is just because people including Chinese themselves have prejudice against Chinese language. Just on the contrast, Chinese is one of the simplest languages in world. I was told that “spoken Chinese is very simple” by lots of foreigners who are Canadian, Indian Canadian, Australians (one of them speak Chinese very well), Vietnamese Australian, American, Chinese American (who was sold to an American family when he was born), Croatian (one of my present coworkers who can speak very well and think in Chinese way), Indian (whose mother tongue is Tamil) Cameroonian (who speak one of African native language as mother tongue, French as official language, and English as third language), and foreigners who can speak both English and Chinese (but neither is their mother tongue) from Korean, Japan, Bombay, Vietnam and Malaysia. As a matter of fact the simplicity lies not only in spoken Chinese but written Chinese as well. Some Chinese learners have experienced the simplicity of written Chinese. If we let 5-years-old children whose mother tongue is neither Chinese nor English begin to learn Chinese and English at the same time, I believe that they will master Chinese before English. Chinese has no grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers), only a few articles (ie. equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender*, although it do have some helper characters that accomplish the same function of English grammar, which are not the equivalents of English grammar in my opinion. More and more westerners who learn Chinese realize that Chinese, at least spoken Chinese, in fact is very simple. Chinese characters are quite logical. So do the words and phrases. Once you learn it you will love it.

To sum it up, Chinese has the advantage of stability, compatibility, informativeness, speed, vigor, and simplicity over English, and will probably replace English in this century. It's time for us to take action to reconsider Chinese now. It's time for every country to teach Chinese now. Any country that moves slow in this action will certainly fall behind.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Abraham Smallwood and Ke Wang, my English teachers in my courses of Ph D, for correcting the grammatical mistakes and giving me some very valuable advice in this article.

转自：http://tanklao.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!B0021D07BAAF8ACF!187.entry

[liuzhou]

Drivel.

[yonglin]

1. Lack of disk space might have been an issue in computing 25 years ago, not today.

2. If we want to save forest, we could just write in size 6. Perfectly legible in English, not quite in Chinese.

3. Have you ever heard of an English-speaking Indian/African who fail to communicate with British/American in written form? There is a standardization of English ("Standard English"), with just a few spelling/vocab varieties. As far as I'm aware, Singaporean English do not use Singlish varieties in formal written communication.

4. Have you ever pondered the fact that if English-speakers were schooled in their mother tongue to the same degree as their Chinese counterparts, they would most probably be able to read Beowulf fluently. Whilst Chinese primary school kids (and even middle school kids) spend most of their Chinese lesson time learning how to read and write. In western schools, the mother tongue classes past the first year of school are spent developing other skills, such as presentation skills or critical thinking skills. If western kids spent years memorizing rarely used and ancient vocabulary (I'm assuming that you'd need some grasp of classical chinese to read the classics), they would be at no disadvantage understanding very old literature. The difference is just that western educationalists did not find it quite as important as the Chinese.

5. Your vocabulary comparison is quite not interesting. In almost all cases, the English words mean exactly the same as their Chinese counterparts: it's just that their word roots are usually in greek or latin. And, yes, we do have common names for biological species (flowers, plants, animals) in the West to (although you might be mislead to thing we do not if you visit the Beijing botanical garden, for instance.

6. Attributing Chinese science olympics medals and success in the sciences to the language of Chinese is really quite mistaking correlation for causation. Firstly, take the case of school kids winning maths/science olympiads: The Chinese educational system is very competetive, students are always set to compete against each other, and there is immense pressure from home to do well, particularly in maths and science (because these are considered the more important subjects). The attitude to teaching these subjects in Western schools, on the other hand, is usually quite lax. This could be because different values, culture, or merely teacher incompetence. It doesn't mean that the Chinese benefit because they can read in Chinese. The fact that graduate schools (PhD programs) in maths/science/economics in the US are populated by foreign students in general, and Chinese students in particular, need not necessarily suggest that they are superior to their American counterparts. What do most talented American college kids do? Generally, they go to law school or medical school, since they feel that that would give their talents sufficient economic rewards. The enrollment of Chinese people (take away naturalized American-Chinese who speak better English than Chinese anyway) on these programs is likely to be minimal. It just has to do with differences in preferences, and individual (funding) opportunities.

So, however much I like Chinese, I think it's ridiculous to claim that it would become the new world language because it is superior to English or some other languages. No language is superior to the other, they're just different, with individual strengths and weaknesses. The reason why some language becomes the dominant language (greek, latin, french, german, english, in turn in the west), has more to do with politics and chance than with the particularities of the language. If only the nature of the language mattered, we would all have switched to esperanto a long time ago - a language which would probably be "superior" (in your sense) both to English and Chinese.

[LaVandez]

Probably there'll be significant speakers of both but don't hold your breath on replacement of english by chinese.

[roddy]

It was supposed to be the leading global language, but an accident happened.

Oh, how terrible. Supposed by who, exactly? Was there a committee?

[Marco]

我只要用一个成语概括这篇文章"妄自尊大".

[xiaocai]

同学，我想，您是不是可以把您有限的精力用到更有意义的事情上面呢？

[muyongshi]

I think I will simply echo the sentiments of my fellows above and say:

"Oh boy! Here we go again!"

[tony1343]

I find the nuclear bomb example a little entertaining. I imagine it should be easier to do something when you are the first to do it, especially considering the allegations of Chinese espionage and stolen nuclear secrets from the U.S.

Also, English is my native tongue (American-English). I've never had a problem communicating with English speaking people from other countries, though I guess I've never spoken to Singpaore-English speaking or African-English speaking people. What is African-English? I have a good friend who is Kenyan, and she speaks superb English with a slight British accent (which is probably diminishing since she lives in the U.S.).

Also, it is very easy for an English speaker to understand a foreignor learning English even when they are pronouncing incorrectly. The same doesn't seem to be true for chinese, but maybe that's because I just pronounce chinese very poorly. Also, I can go anywhere in the United States and there very little differences in the spoken and written English. China is approximately the same size, and that definitely does not hold true for Chinese.

[mr.stinky]

"It's time for us to take action to reconsider Chinese now. It's time for every country to

teach Chinese now. Any country that moves slow in this action will certainly fall behind."

umm, wait a sec, bubba. if the chinese have been speaking chinese thoughout their

glorious 5000-year history, how come they're still developing? you'd think their culture

would spread thoughout the world as a shining beacon of civilization rather than stagnate

behind that thar 'great' wall.

then you can tell me how their 'simple' language will allow them to "surpass the US in

science very soon" when their sum total of scientific discoveries amounts to gunpowder

(prolly a quack traditional doctor accidentally blew up a patient) and paper (or was this

borrowed from egypt?) several thousand years ago.

[Outofin]

I think languages are like media format such as HD-DVD and Blu-ray. People don’t mind using either format or either language. It’s all up to the content, the quality and quantity of its content. Can’t stand English "hegemony"? Enrich Chinese. That’s the meaningful thing to do.

[simonlaing]

I want to pile on with some points against this arguement which seems to come up every few months or so.

1. One point you tried to say Chinese is easy to write.

On the touchstone reality litnus test, many chinese in the 20s can't write moderately complicated characters as they are so used to typing them.

This is not the case with English if they speak the word they can write the word for the most part.

2. The distincition that all chinese is written the same is incorrect as well, as those chinese in the wonderful province of Taiwan seem to still use traditional characters that can be guessed at but not always completely understood by the mainlanders. HK still likes traditional characters even if they are being forced to change.

3. As a previous poster said , every english speaker can understand the written english perfectly (as long as they have the vocab) and most can understand people orally. Orally it is not the case with Chinese Guangdong dialect versus BJ.

4. Chinese has 5 tones (4 tones and the unaccented 1) to English's 2(stressed unstressed). These tones in chinese affect the meaning of the word where as in english they do not, but simply add to emotional meaning. Chinese limited number of words, and often eliminated use of the Subject because it is implied causes Chinese to be more easily confused that English which requires the subject to be considered proper. Also in English even if the stress is incorrect listerners can still understand the meaning.

5. I give you the saving paper argument. This is probably true that books in Chinese would save paper, however this should not bear upon whether Chinese is easier to learn than English.

Can you respond to these points ?

thanks,

Simon:)

[simonlaing]

Also to show my humility there were a couple words in your funny test that I had to look up, I used dictionary.com.

exarticulation - is not a word, the real word is disarticulation with mean dis jointed , or amputated at the joint. 脱臼tuojiu

nephrolith肾结石 -means kidney stone, just like the chinese version. (I'm sure there is a science chinese version of this but you took the easy Chinese one.

, , rhombicosidodecahedron二十面体 ershimianti,Also is a word that doesn't exist. the real word is dodecahedron which is a 12 sided polygon.

saleratus- means Baking soda, also you used the easy Chinese word . I think this perhaps shows more the depth of the english language than its difficulty.

Just in case others were also stumped with these words.

have fun,

Simon:)

[gougou]

rhombicosidodecahedron二十面体 ershimianti,Also is a word that doesn't exist

Then you better delete its wikipedia entry...

[Lu]

An average student of higher schools in China can easily read the books, say Lunyu, Laozi et al, that were written 2000 years ago

Most people I meet have graduated from university, and they tell me they had great trouble with these books when they were taught them in high school. Taught, ie they could not read them without a teacher telling them what it meant.

Drivel, indeed.

[atitarev]

My Chinese colleagues - not so long ago living in China complain they forget how to write. They are amazed how quickly Hanzi disappear from memory.

[roddy]

Just in case others were also stumped with these words.

Some of them were a bit tricky, but I just looked at the Chinese and all was clear.

[Shadowdh]

I really dont want to enter into the argument of "this language will pass this one or this one is better than that one" but to address some points about english...

1. One point you tried to say Chinese is easy to write.

On the touchstone reality litnus test, many chinese in the 20s can't write moderately complicated characters as they are so used to typing them.

This is not the case with English if they speak the word they can write the word for the most part.

I am not so sure about this point as its becoming more and more common for people (at least in the UK) to lack this ability... in fact there are real worries about literacy levels and I have to say in my experience unless the person is at the University level (and sometimes there is no exemption here) there are problems with a lot of language.

3. As a previous poster said , every english speaker can understand the written english perfectly (as long as they have the vocab) and most can understand people orally. Orally it is not the case with Chinese Guangdong dialect versus BJ.

Good point on the written part, but the oral... hmm not so sure... first there is the Geordie accent/dialect (around the region of Newcastle in the UK) I defy anyone but another Geordie to be able to understand that... then there is the Scots and the Irish... man have you heard those geezers talk.. You could even say that Cockney is another form of spoken english but then I could also be talking alot of old pony now couldnt I...

Also, English is my native tongue (American-English). I've never had a problem communicating with English speaking people from other countries, though I guess I've never spoken to Singpaore-English speaking or African-English speaking people. What is African-English? I have a good friend who is Kenyan, and she speaks superb English with a slight British accent (which is probably diminishing since she lives in the U.S.).

My English is UK English (by way of NZ, but having lived in the UK for 13 or 14 years now its pretty much UK now) and I have to say I have had problems working out what an English learner has been trying to say... but mostly because their pronunciation is very different from what I expect the word to sound like... I know quite a few African-English speakers and unless they were educated in the UK or in an overseas UK school their English most emphatically does NOT sound like UK English, and sometimes they even have different vocab...

But tbh I believe no language is better than another... just different, all have their foibles and all have difficulties... instead of attempting one upmanship why not just learn and enjoy...

[Luobot]

Originally posted by tanklao

If Chinese scientists translate all the scientific papers into Chinese and publish all their papers in Chinese, I believe that China will surpass the US in science very soon, because Chinese is a language that runs much faster than English. There was a case to prove it. It took US more one thousand times to invent the nuclear bomb, but it took only about 50 times for China to finish the same work independently.

In support of this theory, the data below shows that the Chinese language improves one’s patience, as in the case of testing nuclear weapons. It can be seen that China was the last to test a nuclear weapon among the so-called “Nuclear Club” of five, around 19 years after the US, thus proving the superiority of the Chinese language. In addition, although not included in the data shown below, you can trust that China spent a mere fraction on that test in comparison to the cost of the Manhattan project.

The five nuclear weapons states of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty and year of first nuclear test (data from Wikipedia):

United States .............. 1945

USSR (now Russia) ..... 1949

United Kingdom ........... 1952

France ........................ 1960

China .......................... 1964

Therefore, I also conclude that Chinese should triumph over English as the global language.

- It imparts greater patience

- It imparts a greater sense of cost-effectiveness

- It imparts greater flavor to Chinese take-out

[aeon]

Sorry, but no way. Fair enough English is only where it is because of history, but an alphabet-based script system is much easier to learn. Now English is the pre-eminent second language it will likely stay that way because it's simpler than the alternatives.

Case in point: My son was able to read English books out loud within 6 months of starting kindy despite starting out with the disadvantage of having almost forgotten his English due to being in China for the previous year (His English sucked so badly I had to speak Chinese to him). Now just turned 7 he is independently learning from and picking up vocabulary from English language books he's chosen to read - I know that they are new words from his reading because every now and then I have to correct his phonetic mispronunciations (yes, we all know English spelling sucks, so don't bother to point it out again ). So that's 2 years for a kid with the attention span of a gnat to go from poor English to reading independently in order to learn. How long does it take for a Chinese kid to go from illiterate to being able to pick up a Chinese medium encyclopaedia and tell his parents something they didn't know using technical language which he's taught himself?