China Vs English

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/7238161.html

The Chinese government is starting a crackdown on the use of English words in the Chinese media claiming that their use sullies the Chinese language.

Frankly, this is clearly trying to be a genie back in the bottle. Certainly media run by the state and the media in general will fall in line since they don't really have a choice. But for the ordinary person on the street I doubt anything will really change and I'm sure than young people in China, an increasing number of whom have some reasonable degree of English skill, will continue on as they and might even make greater use of English just to give the government the finger.

No one really listens to the Académie française so I doubt that in the end the Chinese are going to be able to stop English from "dirtying" Chinese. It all just reeks of old men trying to hold back the tide on things they don't really understand. History has shown that language is too fluid to be controlled like that.

Comments

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of how people are constantly ranting here that the kids are losing their grammar abilities due to the "invasion" of foreign (read: English) borrowed words, the internet, American movies, etc. A brief look on the BG forums reveals a worrying picture: they can't use their own language properly, they substitute the beautiful Cyrillic alphabet with some ridiculous abbreviations (4 for Ч, 6 for Ш, etc) and then they fare very poorly on exams. This is considered to be part of this "spiritual and cultural devolution" that our society has been experiencing for the past 2 decades (marked most eloquently by the Chalga phenomenon).

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

Yeah, kids here do pretty much the same thing. When I was teaching I refused to accept an assignment from a kid who had 2 in place of the word "to". He kept telling me "They mean the same thing!" I told him to sit his butt down and write properly or he'd get a zero.

[confliction.livejournal.com]

Man you sure showed him!

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

Remember when a bunch of people recently tried to codify the legal definition of the word "marriage" because they're afraid that they're losing their monopoly on the colloquial definition?

Didn't work. Word definitions don't determine popular usage, they are determined by it. It sounds like the Chinese are engaged in a similar program of attacking-the-cart-and-not-the-horse.

[verytwistedmind.livejournal.com]

Great post! This is being saved for later use!

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I'll only say this, you can only speak real English if you can translate this without Google and recognize it:

nu scylun hergan
hefaenricaes uard
metudæs maecti
end his modgidanc
uerc uuldurfadur
swe he uundra gihwaes
eci dryctin
or astelidæ
he aerist scop
aelda barnum
heben til hrofe
haleg scepen.
tha middungeard
moncynnæs uard
eci dryctin
æfter tiadæ
firum foldu
frea allmectig

Otherwise you speak the language that beats up other languages and goes through their pockets stealing everything remotely worth having. English as we know it today derives strength from its loanwords, though I daresay anyone of the Anglo-Saxon era would have as much fun understanding David Duke as Duke would have understanding a monolingual Aboriginal Amazonian tribe.

[light-over-me.livejournal.com]

Which is why English has so many fun spelling irregularities....

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

Really sounds like some dialect of Icelandic. Especially when I pronounce it with Icelandic accent. =)

I am an advocate of pure English...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... which is why I use only apropos words such as hoi polloi, ranch, alligator, karaoke, and tofu.

That reminds me of the French attempt to purge their language of words such as "computer." I guess they didn't realize that "computer" has a Latin root.

[light-over-me.livejournal.com]

I had an interesting conversation with a Chinese acquaintance of mine recently-- he is quite upset about the whole push and standardization of Mandarin over other Chinese dialects and languages (like Cantonese, Min, Hakka, etc). Some see this as just another form of censorship. I have also seen this same argument about the whole controversy over traditional versus simplified characters. If I am not mistaken, Taiwan opposes them.

Now I have not personally studied Chinese enough to know how difficult it is to learn both sets of characters easily, but some argue this will eventually lead to Chinese people being unable to read their own historical and literary texts. If true, that is quite frightening indeed. What if an English speaking government decided it wanted to reform English, and introduced a whole new dialect and script...so that eventually the old script was phased out of schools? Of course, this example doesn't work quite as well with English since there are so many English speakers all over the globe...but just image if English were mostly a regional language, and one powerful government had influence over this entire region.

As for English, there are both pros and cons for and against such extensive use of loan words. I can understand both sides of the argument-- English has become such a widespread international language and it bring globalization with it. But many languages do this, including English. Both Korean and Japanese use many English loan words as well, though in Japanese many of them have become quite unrecognizable from their English counterparts-- they have their own script to write them, and their own pronunciation. It was all quite odd to me at first, but I have come to think of them as just another Japanese word, that happens to have had English origin, same as we have many words that have french or latin or germanic origin.

Simplified Chinese

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

It makes sense to simplify the Chinese character set. The Japanese have done well with a reduced and simplified character set. They still retain scholarship on the larger set of archaic characters for scholarly study of ancient literature. It's not much different than the way ancient Latin and Greek are treated in Western culture. There is some archaeological evidence that our phonetic characters were derived as simplifications of ideographic characters used in Sumeria. Ideograms are cumbersome for worldly applications.

In America, we have a standardized English that is promoted as the official language over all of the other dialects in use. Standardizing Mandarin is a similar process to something that has been done here.