Should Chinese replace English.doc
The popularity and spread of a native language has always been a function of the economy of the country to which it belongs. Consider the British. They were the world rulers at one point of time in history and had an extremely strong economy - a fact that spawned the adage “the sun never sets on the English soil”. Along with their domination came the proliferation of their language, English. The language was projected as the language of the world, though the French begged to differ! Gradually it became the common denominator for the conduct of all trade and commerce, as Britain ruled all commercial activity at that time. Consequently, it became necessary for the common man also to adopt this language if he was to remain in the fray of daily activity. Of course, the concept of colonization undertaken by the British helped their cause of world domination to a significant extent: whether in terms of politics, trade, culture and, of course, language. The white mans burden or civilizing the savages, was undertaken by the British to consolidate their single-minded obsession with imperialism. Even though British superiority has been reduced to only a weak shadow of its former strength, the British still continue to rule the world by the sheer dint of the popularity of their language: English. According to some, their language is the new weapon by which the Empire seeks, once again, to establish its strength and superiority. Thats pretty strange for a language thats almost entirely derived from a blend of French, Latin, Greek and Scandinavian! Nonetheless, its true.Now lets take a look at the Chinese language. Its beginnings are obscure and its largely believed to be a descendant of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Philologists claim that ancient Chinese was without inflections and that lots of words were borrowed from Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Through a passage of time, however, the Chinese language came to be standardized and standard Mandarin became the chief language to be used in mainland China. Not only does the language have thousands of letters in its alphabet, each letter is also a picture (pictograph) that conveys its own generic message. Its no wonder then that it takes students quite a few years to learn the rudiments of the language, let alone master it. The English alphabet, on the other hand, has just 26 letters and it doesnt take too long for a student to gain a basic understanding of the same.When one wonders if Chinese will eventually overtake English as the global language, one has to realize that Chinese is already the most widely spoken language in the world, but that is because of the vast population of China! Outside the Chinese mainland, one wonders how many people have a basic or working knowledge of Chinese, either by choice or by compulsion. English on the other hand, is spoken by roughly 350 million people across the world and is gaining popularity in terms of usage and adaptability, even in China! Its a well-known fact that there is huge demand for English speaking professionals in China who can facilitate international business. There is also acute demand for English teachers who can make the Chinese students better equipped for modern-day business and life. So from emerging trends, it seems evident that Chinese is not poised to overtake English as a global language, at least anytime soon. Admittedly, the Chinese economy is strong enough to boost the cause and popularity of its language, just like the English did. But, it is possible that Chinas resurgent economy is a result of its ability to adapt to others languages and way of work rather than the imposition of the Chinese language on other countries.For the mass acceptance of a language, it needs to be simple enough to look approachable. It is plainly evident that English is a far simpler language to learn: grammatically, linguistically, phonetically, as well as in terms of usage and application. On the one hand, Chinese phonetics is extremely complicated. It has four “tones” and each word can be pronounced in four different ways to mean four different things. English phonetics, on the other hand is relatively simpler. It is a global language and has been adopted by different countries as the language of daily use. The accents in which the language is spoken may vary drastically across the globe, but anyone educated consistently in the English medium is usually able to decipher what is being said, whether it is in an Australian, American, or even an Indian accent.Further, English earns tremendous brownie points for itself, by virtue of that one hallmark that ensures the universality and popularity of a language: FLEXIBILITY. The English language is an extremely dynamic one that keeps changing according to the tastes and preferences of the English speaking population of the world. Given its origins, where it borrowed freely from all languages of the world, modern day English too, has no qualms about borrowing words from all over the world. Any word that becomes popular or assumes cult significance in any country, inevitably finds its way to that ultimate tome of approval: The Oxford English Dictionary. Hence we find words in the English language that have been incorporated from French, German, Italian, Dutch, Hindi etc. without even the slightest of modifications. This dynamism of the English language is what keeps it alive and prolongs its appeal. When the perimeters of a language become too rigid, so as to forbid free lending and borrowing of words, it turns upon itself and achieves nothing but its own gradual extinction, as is the case with languages like Sanskrit, Pali, Hebrew, Latin and so on.English remains relevant today in every sphere of human life and activity. Though the Chinese economy is strong enough to significantly boost the cause of the Chinese language, it seems unlikely that Chinese is going to displace English as the global language eventually. If that were to happen, it would entail an entire linguistic and cultural revolution, which does not seem feasible or practical. Interestingly, there is not much effort even from the Chinese to promote their language on an international platform. They are happy to be able to speak their own language, but when it comes to international business, it is they who choose to do business the way the world does - in English.However, it cannot be denied that till date Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world. But that is because of the huge Chinese population, within and outside China. It seems quite improbable and far-fetched that the most widely spoke language in the world will also become the most popularThe US empire is slowly sinking in the West and the sun of China is rising in the East. This is the winter of our discontent and we will give our kingdom for a horse, I suppose. Anyway, Chinese is the major language being studied in American schools these days. A warning sign. And Obama attacks the entire gnome community so they are going nuts, selling and running away. Another day in a dying empire, I suppose.Back when my father and father-in-law studied chemistry or astronomy, they had to learn German. It wasnt optional, it was required if you wanted a Phd. Today, no one has to learn German to advance in the sciences. During the Middle Ages all the way until the French language took over in the 17th century, all learning had to be in Latin. Due to no one leading the way as the attempts at building a Holy Roman Empire always crashed and burned, everyone stuck to Latin for the international language and the Church, before it split asunder in 1495, used Latin for all internal and external communications so Latin enjoyed a much longer reign on the European stage due to this strange set up. But generally speaking, reigns last less about only 300 years or less.汉语的优点Chinese has been widely used in East Asia for thousands of years. 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
