Fraggle, i am an artist. Finding chinese character beautiful is one thing but when they are all over a page its just a mess.
Legions of people said the same thing about the paintings of Picasso, the writings of Faulkner and the music of Lennon and McCartney, all of which are now revered as milestones in the history of civilization. Don't set yourself up to be tallied with the people who were booing at the premiere of Ravel's "Bolero."
I dont mean to offend anyone but lets forget about political correctness and think about the future of humanity.
No one is seriously advocating logograms as the world standard for written communication, even if the unpredictable course of history elevates Chinese to the status of the Wal-Mart World Language. As I have opined consistently, based upon the "achievements" of the PRC government, it's inevitable that they will mandate the adoption of a phonetic writing system---either their own syllabary, which is derived from Chinese characters like Japanese
kana; or the Pin-yin system used by the rest of the world, which is the Roman alphabet with diacritical marks and a few ambiguities such as the city name Xian: one syllable or two?
But before they can standardize
written Chinese they have to standardize
spoken Chinese. As of today something like one-third of the population do not speak Mandarin as their native tongue and about half of those people are not functionally fluent in it. Those people can read "written Chinese" because it's a fictitious language that only exists on paper, with thousands of logograms precisely transcribing more than 95% of the words of formal speech regardless of the way their pronunciations have diverged into disparate languages (not dialects) over the past three thousand years. They will
not be able to read Mandarin words transcribed phonetically by any system, because they cannot understand those words when spoken.
Step One: The Mandarinization of the country. (The morality of this, from the standpoint of culture, even with the odd wrinkle that the various Chinese languages use largely identical vocabulary and syntax, is a topic for another thread.) Step Two: Conversion to a phonetic writing system.
Step One will be complete in two more generations. Step Two will probably take about the same amount of time.
What you say about different ways of thinking is very telling and i never thought of it that way but i think that is a major problem facing humans. We cannot think differently and expect to conquer challenges that will arise in the future. We need to get on the same page and this is holding us back.
You misunderstand me and the clue you missed was my emphasis of multilingualism as a goal at the individual level, not as a barrier to progress and harmony at the tribal level. When you learn a second language you learn a second way of thinking. This provides you with a significant second perspective for critically reviewing your own thoughts. Studying Chinese tremendously improved my writing (something at which I now earn a living). When I put together a sentence, a little critic in my head is organizing the same thought in Chinese syntax (even though it doesn't know all the words) and chiding, "Couldn't you straighten that out and eliminate all the meaningless words to make it clearer and give it more punch? Why specify the gender and number of all those people and the time at which all those actions take place, when there is no real constraint on them? Couldn't you describe those relationships a lot more precisely by not relying on that pathetic set of Stone Age prepositions?"
What makes English pretty powerful is its vast range of words and ways to express yourself.
It is at exactly the same level as Chinese on this.
What it doesnt have it absorbs from other languages.
Chinese accomplishes the same thing by having a more powerful word-building engine, like German only without the cumbersome need to respect grammatical rules within a compound word. English has been doing this on the sly by building compound words out of Latin and Greek roots (e.g. "television" comes from both languages). But lately we have started using more of our own wordstock, with an explosion of new compounds like cost-effective and industry-standard that don't require a Latin/Greek dictionary to decipher the first time you see them; we're doing it the Chinese way.
Whats also helping it out has being the advent of the information age and how it is the primary language on the internet and on massive amounts of the worlds air and tv shows.
As I said, that's an accident of history. French, Latin and Aramaic (as well as several others) were once the universal language of Western civilization and anyone who wanted to consort with it. Even after the nation of the language's origin lost prominence or actually disappeared (e.g. the Aramaeans), the language hung on for centuries through sheer inertia. Even if the sun finally sets on the Anglo-American Empire, English may continue to be the international language
for a while, if only because of that mountain of software documentation.
But if we've learned one thing from history, it's the aphorism, "This too shall pass."
I guess right now its the most useful language to know and communicate in at the moment.
And the winner of the World Language award will have nothing to do with how "good" a language it is.
Take a country like Nigeria for example.. dozens of different languages are spoken there, but the only official language. . . . is/was English. In South Africa... with over a dozen official languages, the primary language is English. Even the President address`s the nation in English.
The same is essentially true of India with its enormously larger population. While Hindi is also a language that is taught in virtually all schools and publications in Hindi probably outnumber all other Indian languages combined, it is still the language of one ethnic group and as such is rejected for both everyday and official discourse. Of course this leaves the country in the bizarre position of embracing the language of its only recently overthrown conquerors.
