China bans English words in media
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
This seems like a par for the course from a nation that looked until the 1500s like it would be the dominant world power before it turned inward.
You're absolutely right about the Spanish, but it would be more appropriate to say the Hapsburgs, because what we're really talking about here is Spain, Austria-Hungry, the Balkans, The Holy Roman Empire... a huge portion of Europe all controlled centrally.
The French followed them, and for a period, the state of power was essentially France vs everyone else. England took off later, and that's the history most of us (Americans) are more familiar with.
BUT... this is a very Eurocentric view of history. There was a tremendous amount of other stuff going on leading up to and during this period in China, India, and what was once the Ottoman empire. In hindsight there are many reasons why our planet eventually became Eurocentric, but in 1500 that was not at all apparent - if things in China had gone differently; if they had not closed out new, outside, innovative ideas, we could very well have a very Chinese world today.
Excuse my spelling-nazism, but I believe that should be Austria-Hungary.
Austria-Hungry would mean something completely different.
(Tired of the same old "Hungary for Turkey" non-jokes? Or just bitter about that whole Ottoman occupation thing?)
I suppose that this could be interpreted as 'disallowing "franglais"', but your post is somewhat misleading. The media – newspapers, television, etc. – can say whatever the hell they want to, in whatever language they want to, and remain quite full of anglicisms, including "e-mail."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law
The french wikipedia page mentions that this law was later substantially watered down by the constitutional council.
They understand the power of the language and expanding your culture over others.
Some time ago you couldn't even send air mail without having some french words on the envelope.
Since most people never get far in foreign language classes, media exposure is a major factor in foreign language literacy.
(1) Languages that borrow don't just borrow when they "need" to. For example, most languages have perfectly good ways to communicate "okay", but may borrow it nonetheless. But over time the borrowing may displace the native words or limit their applicability. The Chinese may be anxious that sinitic words will shrink in semantic scope once widespread borrowing takes over. This is not a disaster from a linguistic point of view, of course; it is just language change. But those that deem foreign borrowings illegitimate out of a sense of nationalism will be left with a sense of a shrinking language. Perhaps this is an element in the chauvinism you mentioned.
(2) In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes a language harder to learn, cf. English. I don't know if the Chinese government deserves credit for realizing this, though.
Interesting point. I wonder to what extent that would continue to be the case if words were regularized (with respect to conjugation and plurals, as well as with respect to spelling).
Instead I notice them making the same grammatical errors over and over again. For instance Chinese speakers frequently mangle English plurals and omit articles "a" and "the".
So I think the hardest part of learning any language is always the grammar rather than the words, if the grammar differs from your native grammar. It's easy to map "aeroplane" to "avion" but much harder to map "the" to "le/la/l'/les/las" depending on context.
That fits my experience as a foreign-language teacher (Chinese to native speakers of English, English to native speakers of various Sinitic languages and to speakers of Japanese, Biblical Hebrew in the medium of Modern Standard Chinese to Taiwanese persons of varying native languages, including one non-Sinitic native language). The categories that are hardest to notice in the acquired language are the categories that don't even exist in the speaker's native language. (For example, Chinese has neither number for nouns nor tense for verbs, nor does it have indefinite or definite articles, so native speakers of Chinese regularly confuse those issues in English.) This is especially so when the grammatical features are marked by phonological features that don't exist in the first language. Chinese does not have syllable-final consonant clusters, so a Chinese speaker's ear is not practiced in hearing those in other languages. So the difference between "fix" (present tense) and "fixed" past tense can be missed on TWO levels by a native speaker of Chinese learning English, as can the difference between "sixth" (singular) and "sixths" (plural).
Americans, of course, make a huge number of grammar mistakes when speaking Chinese, and rarely notice themselves doing so.
That's an empirical claim. Is there any evidence to back that up? In particular, is there any standardized way to characterize which languages have more diverse etymologies and which have less? Is there a standardized way to compare the difficulty of learning languages as a second language in the abstract (as contrasted with the difficulty of learning some particular language given a particular first-language background)?
I get the distinct impression, from my acquaintance with people from all over the world, that many second-language learners think learning English is rather easy, not least because there are so very many opportunities to be exposed to English and to practice English all over the world.
PS: Learning the language is not just about learning _ as a second language, primary schools spend a lot of time teaching the proper way to communicate. And English requires far more instruction time than some other closely related languages like Spanish.
It's more likely that it is to do with linguistic heritage, cf the French.
It's not "public awareness" they raise (how condescending to think it takes a national foreign literacy program for the people to know what's happening in their country). They mainly act as hubs for foreign interest lackeys (disgruntled opposition leaders, shady figures and such), and propaganda.
It's ludicrous to think that laws need to be created to help protect the language of Shakespeare.While a nice line, it is wrong. Everything needs protection.
Especially great things, like the "language of Shakespeare".
Now, this protection need not necessarily be in the form of law, but it sure needs to be in the form of effort.
Do you have a logical or empirical basis for this statement, or is this an axiom for you?
Ignoring the passive-aggressiveness, yes, I have an empirical basis for this statement.
Don't you?
Ever heard of the "broken window" theory? Ever heard of entropy? Ever read the history of any cultural aspect, from poetry to jazz, to teaching, to coding?
Everything needs protection --people putting in the effort, care, education, craftsmanship and hard work to keep it alive, to improve it and to resist the tendency to decay and dillution.
Yes, some things, those that are vulnerable, need protection. The Bengal tiger needs protection. The tribal languages in the Amazon need protection. English is in no way vulnerable, so it really doesn't need any protection.
On the other hand, maybe you need to read the history of how English evolved into what it is today. It certainly isn't because of prescriptivist nonsense like "protect[ing]" the language from "decay and dilution".
to coding?
Funny you mention that -- one programming language that's been "protect[ed]" from "decay and dilution" a lot is Java, and look what a boring, unimaginative cesspool that's become.
Huh? Java "protected from decay and dilution"?
Witch the exception of SUN never liking native interface linking, Java was ANYTHING BUT protected from decay. Java went about adding and adopting stuff, from Swing to generics to annotations to functional stuff, to remoting, to various EE fads of the day, without ever thinking about whats best about the core language and how to keep it clean and agile.
I would have liked it if in place of Java we had a purer language, like, say, Smalltalk.
Compare Java to C#. C# was originally a Java clone, but the designers liberally borrowed from everywhere, worrying about actual use cases and not purity of any sort. Today C# is at the boundary between mainstream and academic programming. (It has monads for God's sake. They don't call it monads, of course. They call it LINQ.)
Java? It added generics after C# did, and only now is it finally going to add proper closures.
I'll go with everything which you want to continue into the future needs caring for, but purity of the Chinese language seems like a strange thing to be optimizing for and expending effort on instead of, say population happiness or ability to trade with other countries or healthcare or whatever.
Who is keeping score on language purity and what makes it a metric worth doing well on?
Here, the geolocal minority language is Welsh. It is kept on life support by a smallish and dwindling number of native speakers (virtually no only-Welsh speakers remain, 600,000 people identify as Welsh speakers, but the Wikipedia article suspiciously avoids mentioning how many of those consider themselves 'fluent'), and a government mandate that all official documents, announcements, roadsigns / etc. must be in Welsh as well as English, and mandatory teaching at school.
I was wondering recently if it would be interesting to argue that forcibly teaching children a globally useless language for the sake of pleasing the adults who arbitrarily want it saved is a weak form of child abuse. It certainly isn't a form of educating children in a way that is in their best interest at least, which I'd think is a pretty strong heuristic for a useful education system.
The main out against that argument is that language education in school is so ineffective and accounts for such a small amount of time that it's hardly a thing worth complaining about against the backdrop of all the other things which could be improved.
> I was wondering recently if it would be interesting to argue that forcibly teaching children a globally useless language for the sake of pleasing the adults who arbitrarily want it saved is a weak form of child abuse.
Actually, killing the language and the culture of a child because it is "useless globally" is cultural genocide.
And it has happened way too much.
Now for people conditioned to think that "evolution" should be applied to human matters, culture, this might not seem much.
But go read the experiences of smaller cultures oppressed and eliminated by "global" or local mightier forces, and you can plainly see it's a different kind of holocaust.
I want ways of life to change, die and whither organically, by their own cultural momentum. Not by "global forces" and market influence. And surely not by cultural imperialism.
I have no problem with that. Culture isn't something which suffers when you kill it, only humans/animals do. Trying to apply the horror that goes with the word "genocide" to killing "a language" isn't a clean argument.
Besides, I didn't mean mandate that nobody is allowed to speak it, and thus quickly finish it off, I meant do not mandate the use of it, and if it can't stay in use due to interested people choosing to learn and use it, then let it fade away.
But go read the experiences of smaller cultures oppressed and eliminated by "global" or local mightier forces, and you can plainly see it's a different kind of holocaust.
It isn't any kind of holocaust unless the people are slaughtered. "Nobody knits jumpers, cooks or speaks in the age old traditional ways anymore, they all sold out to factories and convenience, waah" is not a cause I can work up much sympathy for. If you like cooking, knitting, speaking in those ways then do it. But there's nothing inherently great about traditional ways, so if nobody can be bothered then it's better to leave them to history than to life support them.
"Internet" "World Wide Web" "iPhone" "HDMI cable" "Digital SLR"
Are all pretty much exactly the same in Spanish as English. To remove the 'English' there... well you need to make up totally new words then. Seems a difficult problem.
Note: I'm not even great at English some days, and know little about Chinese.
every country does that to some extent.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
The progress of a common language in China has been remarkably slow, doubtless because the wretched poverty of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution periods slowed development of telephony and internal travel, which do much to build a common language in any country. (The United States population is made up of not more than about 25 percent persons of English-speaking ancestry, but English has been the common language of the country even in peak periods of immigration, and even when American-born persons, such as both of my maternal grandparents, could receive their entire primary education in a non-English language--German in their case.) But if commonality of a language is the concern, it doesn't really matter whether or not Modern Standard Chinese of the 21st century has lots of English loanwords or only just a few. The issue is whether everyone living in China has much opportunity to communicate with one another freely and to travel readily.
The German and Japanese, were they just seamless?
And the opposite is also true. Other languages may have some pretty cool contractions for some stuff, that in english we are left with two or three descriptive words put together to get any sense.
English is a great language (though a very hard one to learn) precisely because it's cobbled together from bits of other languages. If another language has a word for a concept we're missing then we just acquire the word.
So if your friend gets drunk on tequila and vodka and eats too much foie gras and winds up with a tattoo of a voodoo shaman holding a katana in a sauna dancing the hula with a walrus then by all means you can feel schadenfreude about it.
Perhaps like this: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.language.artificial/msg/6... (An essay by Poul Anderson explaining nuclear physics using only Germanic words)
My friend, run, do not walk, to http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Headside
(Example article: http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Banded_Folkdoms_of_Americkslan... )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cantonesebillboard.jpg
Here is the original announcement in Chinese:
http://www.gapp.gov.cn/cms/html/21/508/201012/708310.html
and a rough Google translated version:
But there's a ton of misuse on both sides. God help you if you believe that there's a "Chinese alphabet" that things like initials can be translated into (http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/ has a long list of tattoo victims of that gibberish "Asian font"), but there's plenty of the reverse, too. I still haven't tried "Pocari Sweat" (a common sports drink that doesn't sound very appetizing; there should be pictures of it on engrish.com among other places).
Loanwords tend to pe pronounced quite differently in the host language, which detoriates the accent.
Full text: http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
"It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
One of the most insightful sentences I've ever read. IMHO, non-European languages only have rough equivalents for Renaissance concepts like equality, democracy, scientific inquiry etc (yeah yeah, I know Greece had a so-called democracy; I'm talking about our modern-day understanding of these concepts). Blocking the precise word from being used in Chinese may be a mind-control trick.
And I'm not so sure that their concept of the meaning of "democracy" was significantly different to ours, even though there were significant differences for how it went on in practice.
And hence supporting my claim that "democracy" is a Renaissance concept rather than an ancient Greek concept.
(Switzerland didn't have it until 1971, and is still one of the most prosperous and peaceful countries on Earth. Germany granted women the vote in 1918, and we all know how that worked out...)
For that matter, ALL countries that I am aware of that allow their citizens to vote set an arbitrary 'magic number' and don't let you vote unless you are at least that old. Are those not democracies as we currently understand it?
In the United States, non-citizen residents are not allowed to vote. How is this any different from the ancient Greeks not allowing non-citizen residents to vote? Their democracy was not at all that different from our democracies today, it is the definition of "full citizen" that has changed.