superstring01
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the first bit however seemed to reflect kurzweil's accelerating returns, exponential growth and wait....wait...the singularity.
THERE IT IS PEOPLE!!!!
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the first bit however seemed to reflect kurzweil's accelerating returns, exponential growth and wait....wait...the singularity.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-27/china-lures-u-s-pilots-tired-of-14-year-wait-for-captain-s-seat.html said:"... John Krizman has spent 13 years as a co-pilot* at American Airlines. … Krizman was one of about 550 pilots who attended a China job fair in Miami last week, as first officers find fewer chances for promotion in the U.S. because of slower airline growth and captains retiring later.* There are jobs available in China, where a surging economy and a fleet expected to grow 11 percent a year through 2015, …
To help lure overseas crew members, Spring Air pays foreign pilots 30 percent more than domestic staff, Shen said, without elaboration. Air China Ltd., the nation’s largest international carrier, was offering $198,000 a year net plus bonuses for Airbus SAS A330 pilots, according to an advertisement on the website of Wasinc International, the recruitment company that helped run the job fair. ...
Promotion won’t happen for at least five more years at American, while in China it could occur straightaway. He and his wife “are all set to go,” he said. ..."
http://www.ehow.com/info_7736425_average-yearly-salary-airline-pilot.html#ixzz25b2x9f9G said:“…Average {US} starting regional airline pilot pay ranged from $17,000 to $26,000 per year, … According to The Wall Street Journal, the average starting salary at major airlines was $36,283 per year …”
Actually we don't call it "Old English" anymore. The rule for determining whether two speech variants can have the same name is that they must be intercomprehensible. This rule can be bent for a dialect continuum (the people in adjoining regions can understand each other, even if the people at the two ends of the continuum cannot) but it's enforced with more rigor temporally than spatially. Today's Greeks can read the original writings of Plato and Aristotle with a little coaching and practice, and in fact are expected to do so in university classes, so we call Plato's language Ancient Greek. But today's Englishmen cannot read Beowulf. So we call that language Anglo-Saxon. With coaching and practice we can read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, so we call that language Middle English, but an Englishman of Chaucer's time would not have understood Beowulf.so? the orthography and construction of old english differs from the modern and yet is still called english.
Well this argues for Chinese then. They have the world's oldest continuous civilization.Gee! I wonder if humans will still be around 2000 years from now? And here you are nitpicking the language that might be in use if there are still some humans around. The potential for some kind of world disaster that will kill off billions of humans is high, so whatever language is being spoken may have more to do with survivors than anything else.
China established itself as an empire after a Paradigm Shift: the Iron Age. They brought their iron-based technology, as well as their writing system, their culture and the Buddhism which they in turn got from the Indians, to Korea, Japan, and other nearby peoples.It's really going to depend on who the world powers are. We might be able to say China's going to dominate economically for the next few decades--or beyond--but millennia? Who knows?
That's unlikely. Educated Indians all speak English and use it in business, government and education. There's more "Hinglish" in Hindi than in the Indian dialect of English. Although Hindi is the "dominant" language of India, it has that status only because it's the dialect of the New Delhi region so many government workers speak it as their regional language. This earns it considerable animus from people in the rest of the country. When two Indians from different provinces meet, they speak English to each other, not Hindi.so lets say in the future we throw in 10% of hindi, will it be know as hindglish?
Languages take strange turns. The Aramaeans were a minor, powerless subject people in the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Yet for reasons that I've never seen explained convincingly, Aramaic became both the administrative and vernacular language of the region. The Aramaean people vanished into the Melting Pot thousands of years ago, but their language was the lingua franca of the Middle East right up into the early 20th century. It still has a sizeable community of speakers and there are many websites in Aramaic.what bearing does that have on the de facto lingua franca of the world? the largest gdp determines primacy of language?
In English we call them the Romance languages: Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, French, Occitan, Romansh, Italian, Romanian, and various other tongues which may or may not be merely dialects depending on whom you're talking to, such as Sicilian.Not into English which has quite different structure, but into the "Latin Languages," like Spanish.
But after the Industrial Revolution, when printing presses could be driven by motors instead of musclepower, that technology drove the spread of education beyond the upper classes and led to today's effectively-universal literacy. At that point, it became reasonable to print books, newspapers and other documents in local languages.False premise - Latin remained the international lingua franca and language of culture until the 1800's (up until that time, the majority of all books printed every year were written in Latin, for example).
Sure, but don't discount this Paradigm Shift. The Electronic Revolution is hardly over. You and I probably won't live to see translation software that does as good a job as a human translator, but our younger members may very well do so. This will do wonders for the preservation of the world's many languages, which in turn will do wonders for world culture, as each language can easily express thoughts that might not occur to a speaker of another.Moreover, the demand for standardized language to enable global communication is much, much higher.
When Paris Hilton was more prominent, one of our comic strips introduced a character who was Paris Hilton's cousin on the less successful side of her family. Her name was Fresno Travelodge.. . . . Paris Hilton . . . .
In addition, Latin was not taught to women - so the people raising the children were not reading, writing, or speaking it.More to the point, Latin was only ever the language of the (relatively small) educated and governing classes. Your average peasant never had any need to communicate with anybody more than a stone's throw away, and so Latin was never really the standardized, everyday language in that area that English is all over the world today.
I doubt that the families of pilots, who currently tend to live in enclaves anyway (flexible location comes with the job), will be learning Putonghua at anything like the rate at which Chinese pilots will be learning the lingua franca of international air travel communication, which is a simplified derivative of English. There are several advantages to English as that kind of semi-pidgin technical communication, among them its flexible word order, lack of gender, simplicity and optionality of inflexion, lack of radio-unfriendly "tones", and absence of structural class distinctions (South Korea's national airline mandated English in the airplane, even for pilot to copilot communication, after losing several airplanes to physics, which does not recognize the need for sociolinguistic deference in emergency situations).billy said:Many pilots will come from the stagnate USA airline industry, and with their families be learning Mandarin
- - - According to Chinese government figures, only 53% of the population speak putonghua. - - - -
- - - - -
The saving grace is that the majority of these dialects have a common written form. The pronunciation of any character can be completely different in say, Beijing from that in Guangzhou (where Cantonese is the dominant language), but the character looks the same. For that reason, nearly all television programmes are subtitled and the Chinese often communicate by passing notes. - - -
The communist government instituted the universal instruction of Mandarin, and of course all radio and TV broadcasts are in Mandarin--except in Hong Kong/Xianggeng. Now that every Chinese child attends school, they are all learning it. Almost everyone under 30 can understand it reasonably well, and most can express themselves in it even if they speak a regional language at home. In two more generations, when only the most elderly are Mandarin-challenged (and even they will have been exposed to it on TV for many decades), Mandarin will be China's universal language.The common written language of China seems a major wild-card factor overlooked here, but there is no universally spoken Chinese language even within China . . . .
Mandarin is a language in the Sino-Tibetan language family. Wu, Cantonese and Min also have sizeable communities of speakers, and there are a total of seven to thirteen languages that make up the Chinese branch of Sino-Tibetan, depending on which linguist you ask.. . . . the current dialect of the Mandarin family now semi-standardized for government communications over part of the Chinese mainland.
Hard to imagine that the women of Rome never spoke. So what language did they speak, if not Latin? Also what is the basis for your amazing statement ("people raising children were not speaking Latin") even in Rome?In addition, Latin was not taught to women - so the people raising the children were not reading, writing, or speaking it. ...
You know much more than I do but more than a decade ago I read (If memory serves) that all the logograms use no more than 7 basic strokes. Consequently Chinese was much more compatible with computers than English. I.e. any logogram could be represented by for example: 1001110 where the initial 1 states the stoke its initial place "holds," for example is a vertical line, and present in that logogram. If that is not what article said (probably not as there could be more than one vertical line I would bet in the same logogram) then an octal instead of binary representation is need. i.e. 0 could be "nothing in this possible place," 1 could be "vertical line in this possible,"... 7 could be "dot in this possible place." then logogram could be (2042651) and very compatable with an octal computer word. Of course this "computer friendly" representation of logograms would still do nothing for telling how to pronounce the logogram.... This allows them to be united by a common written language, because that writing system uses logograms instead of phonetic symbols. ...
But once they all use the same sounds, not just the same words pronounced differently, they'll be able to convert to a phonetic system. ...
Reminds me of how they talk in the show, "Firefly". A mash up of English and Chinese because those are the two cultures that dominate the landscape in the future evisioned by Joss Whedon.It'll be a combination of English, Spanish and Mandarin.
I call it Manglish. Or Spingdarin. You pick.
I agree that English is far ahead now and surely will at least double Latin´s 500 year endurance. In many ways English - language of tiny Island with few people - became globally dominate because of the steam engine, the cotton gin & the power loom, each of which made the other two much more productive and other shipping advances* that let England build and "an economic empire on which the sun never set." England could deliver to any port in the world textiles with less than 1/3 the cost of local production and ruled the world because of these technical advances. Note also that Mahatma Gandhi in some sense understood this and made the spinning wheel his symbol and all his own clothes, starting with Indian grown cotton, but few followed his example so the economically advantaged language (English in this case) took over India. (As history shows it always does. I.e. Farsi-> Greek-> Latin-> dark age in west -> Spanish-> French-> English-> Mandarin?)Are we still seriously debating the notion that English won't completely dominate the world in the future in favor of Mandarin?...
You might want to reread the post, there, in context - that was kind of the point.billy said:In addition, Latin was not taught to women - so the people raising the children were not reading, writing, or speaking it. ...
Hard to imagine that the women of Rome never spoke. So what language did they speak, if not Latin? Also what is the basis for your amazing statement ("people raising children were not speaking Latin") even in Rome?
As pointed out above, they don't have "a language". Speakers of different Chinese languages often communicate, within China, by passing notes to each other. A plausible solution would be for the current spread of English in China to continue, providing the Chinese with a common language well suited for handling the concurrently spreading Western technology.billy said:If China becomes the dominate Economic power of the globe, as England did, I expect their language will dominate too in less than 500 years,
That's not fast enough - even without the writing issue. The technology incursion and foreign exposure Billy is talking about is happening now, and the closest thing the Chinese have to a common language capable of handling its demands (written and spoken, domestic and foreign) is English - which is likewise, with the official Mandarin dialect, being exposed to the young and taught all over the country.fraggle said:In two more generations, when only the most elderly are Mandarin-challenged (and even they will have been exposed to it on TV for many decades), Mandarin will be China's universal language.
I suppose this could be true--my command of han zi is pretty elementary. Yet even I notice that the "basic strokes" (which are actually combinations of as many as 11 strokes, that's not very accurate terminology) are squashed and stylized to fit in the basic rectangle in which all words must fit. There are something like 175 of these basic components and there can be as many as six of them in one logogram. That would require a minimum of twelve (thirteen?) bits to represent digitally. I can't guess at the number of additional bits necessary to represent their squashing and stylizing, not to mention exactly where they fit in the character. Certainly at least five more bits, maybe seven or eight. So we have a 21-bit identifier to transcribe slightly fewer than 100,000 words. It doesn't seem like much of an improvement.You know much more than I do but more than a decade ago I read (If memory serves) that all the logograms use no more than 7 basic strokes. Consequently Chinese was much more compatible with computers than English. I.e. any logogram could be represented by for example: 1001110 where the initial 1 states the stoke its initial place "holds," for example is a vertical line, and present in that logogram.
This is vastly oversimplified. I'm positive it is not the work of Chinese person.If that is not what article said (probably not as there could be more than one vertical line I would bet in the same logogram) then an octal instead of binary representation is need. i.e. 0 could be "nothing in this possible place," 1 could be "vertical line in this possible,"... 7 could be "dot in this possible place." then logogram could be (2042651) and very compatable with an octal computer word.
There are 1,600 possible syllables in Mandarin phonetics. So add another eleven bits for that?Of course this "computer friendly" representation of logograms would still do nothing for telling how to pronounce the logogram.
Balderdash.Have you heard that Chinese logograms are more "computer friendly" than phonetic symbols? Do you have some comments?
That's because English (like French, Europe's other major living language throughout history) has never undergone spelling reform. Most of the other European languages threw out their dictionaries in the 19th century and began writing reasonable approximations to the way their words are pronounced.Written English does a terrible job of recording the sounds we use.
I spoke to that. The vast majority of Chinese today can understand Mandarin, and well over half of them can speak it--especially working-age people in the cities where they need to communicate.You might want to reread the post, there, in context - that was kind of the point. As pointed out above, they don't have "a language". Speakers of different Chinese languages often communicate, within China, by passing notes to each other. A plausible solution would be for the current spread of English in China to continue, providing the Chinese with a common language well suited for handling the concurrently spreading Western technology.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you mean writing English in logograms, forget it. The phonetics of Chinese are very constrained. It's impossible to render a word from most foreign languages recognizably in Chinese symbols. This is the reason it's almost impossible for Chinese to borrow foreign words. If you've ever seen the awkward Japanese transcription of a foreign name in katakana (Makudonarudo for "McDonalds") you have some idea of what the Chinese face. I remember Ni ki sen for "Nixon."One interesting possibility is that they will come to write this Chinese version of English in their current system, already in use for several other otherwise mutually unintelligible languages throughout Asia. As a partial solution to the translation problem, it seems worth checking out.
They just find English to be a bewilderingly awkward language, utterly primitive compared to Chinese. Why do we still have masculine/feminine, present/past/future, singular/plural, Stone Age paradigms they abandoned thousands of years ago? Why do we have inflections (sing/sang/sung)? Why can we rearrange the words in a sentence without changing the meaning? Why do we have virtually meaningless "noise words" like articles and prepositions?English would have the advantage of being a living language - spoken by mothers to children and children to each other, adaptable to the needs of any region.
And I spoke to that, with a link to a source from the official Chinese government statistics (hardly presumed to be lowballing their achievements) that put a number to that claim - 53% - and a more accurate term for the language - putonghua, the official one of what we are calling "dialects" of the Mandarin collection or whatever (some of these "dialects" being mutually unintelligible).fraggle said:I spoke to that. The vast majority of Chinese today can understand Mandarin, and well over half of them can speak it--especially working-age people in the cities where they need to communicate.
Being able to rearrange the words, to shade the meaning and provide emphasis and so forth, is a strength, a virtue, of English. It also provides some flexibility handy for the wide variety of other language speakers approaching it - they can make themselves rudimentarily understood in their own word order. Chinese is deficient in this regard, flawed.fraggle said:Why do we still have masculine/feminine, present/past/future, singular/plural, Stone Age paradigms they abandoned thousands of years ago? Why do we have inflections (sing/sang/sung)? Why can we rearrange the words in a sentence without changing the meaning? Why do we have virtually meaningless "noise words" like articles and prepositions?
They need to grow up - maybe find an appreciation of the power and clarity and subtlety available from things like prepositions. I don't find their language to be a rigid, insular, eroded, cartoonish, dropped-silverware sit-com Tarzan bead-strung antheap of homonyms, not because that is an inaccurate description, but because I recognize the virtues that outweigh the defects.fraggle said:They find our language to be a joke and they have trouble taking it seriously.
Meanwhile, English can easily take in thousands more words from all Chinese dialects, making itself at home in yet another country. Yet another reason China would be more likely to continue adapting English piecemeal to China than the rest of the world's peoples would be to adopt any of the several dialects of Mandarin wholesale as their language.The phonetics of Chinese are very constrained. It's impossible to render a word from most foreign languages recognizably in Chinese symbols. This is the reason it's almost impossible for Chinese to borrow foreign words.
Have you heard that Chinese logograms are more "computer friendly" than phonetic symbols?
I don't care what your linguistic qualifications are,
They need to grow up -
In addition, most common characters for the roughly 1600 mandarin syllables have strong connotations in the Chinese alphabet so the longer the foreign name or term the more likely it will be that the name has to have obscure characters, characters that don't match the desired phonetics or unsavory connotations. "Bite the wax tadpole" was apparently used by some shopkeepers until Coke Cola settled on "kekou kele". http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.aspThe phonetics of Chinese are very constrained. It's impossible to render a word from most foreign languages recognizably in Chinese symbols. This is the reason it's almost impossible for Chinese to borrow foreign words. If you've ever seen the awkward Japanese transcription of a foreign name in katakana (Makudonarudo for "McDonalds") you have some idea of what the Chinese face. I remember Ni ki sen for "Nixon."
Brilliant post...British shipping advances would have to include Harrison's chronometer, enabling ships to determine longitude accurately.In many ways English - language of tiny Island with few people - became globally dominate because of the steam engine, the cotton gin & the power loom, each of which made the other two much more productive and other shipping advances that let England build and an economic "empire on which the sun never set".
England could deliver to any port in the world textiles with less than 1/3 the cost of local production and ruled the world because of these technical advances. Note also that Mahatma Gandhi in some sense understood this and made the spinning wheel his symbol and all his own clothes, starting with Indian grown cotton, but few followed his example so the economically advantaged language took over India.
If China becomes the dominate Economic power of the globe for centuries, as England did, I expect their language will dominate too in less than 500 years, especially as there are so many more of them than population of England
As you speak mainly about the great number of English speakers, I have the same question for you.Billy. Can you read?