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

[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.