Your next language is ... Chinese!
I'm reading this article in the April 2006 Wired
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/mandarin.html
about how China is pushing Mandarin to be the language of choice in the world. It's already the most popular language in the world.
Here's a quote: "The days of everyone trying to be American are over"
I've been trying to learn some Mandarin but it's hard and I'm just trying to pronounce simple things like "Good Morning" which sounds something like "Chow On". I can say the "Chow" part right but I have trouble saying "On" because it sounds more like "Awn" or "Aaun". No matter how many times they correct me, I can never get it right.
I'm planning to buy a book to help me learn some Mandarin but I'm wondering how a book is going to teach me how pronounce the word correctly.
Sometimes the Children like to have me say Chinese words. They get minutes of amusement as I mangle the words. They repeat, I repeat, they laugh.
I think Asian languages are inefficient because each word a symbol. I think letter-based languages are more efficient. Chinese uses different tones for different words. That's confusing and very frustrating to me when I pronounce the word correctly but in the wrong tone.
Letter based languages are certainly easier to type.
I was wondering how the Chinese type. Here is an example of a Chinese keyboard.
When I got my new PC I could toggle between Chinese and English keyboard input and sometimes it toggled on it's own and suddenly I was typing in Chinese and I saw that I got a pop-up showing many choices. This type of typing seemed quite slow to me.
I wonder how Chinese characters are stored in the PC. You cannot use ASCII (8 bits) since that only offers 256 choices. 16 bits offers 65,536 but is that enough to hold every Chinese character? I'm pretty sure the answer is no so the next step is 32 bits per character which gives you over 4 million (4,294,967,296) combos. I'm guessing there are less than 4 million Chinese characters and I'm wondering how the Chinese solved this problem back when we were using 16-bit computers.
The thought of learning Chinese actually frightens me. It's just so different to read, write and speak. But of course that's what the Chinese have to deal with when learning English.
English is not a great language either. If we're all going to speak one language, we should all speak Esperanto. That language has many advantages.
1. It is a neutral language, being the property of no particular group of people and therefore the equal property of everybody.
2. It is relatively easy to learn. It would appear from personal experience and anecdotal evidence that, for an English speaker, Esperanto is perhaps five times as easy to learn as Spanish, ten times as easy as Russian, and "considerably" easier than Chinese, Japanese or Arabic.
3. It's rules are very simple. Everything is spelled how it sounds. Letters only have one sound. There's one way to make a word plural or to make a word female or male gendered.
Strangely enough there are people who are against Esperanto. Here is a web page that explains why Esperanto is bad.
Here is a fun Esperanto tutorial. Here is The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9) written in Esperanto.
Here are the languages I've tried to learn. Esperanto has inspired me to invent my own language just for fun. I work on it in my free time. The words in my language will be generated from my simplified alphabet using a program I plan to write. The most common words people use will be the shortest words and the least common words will be the longest words. My language will be designed for speed of talking, writing and typing. It will be very condensed.
For a long time I've been coming up with a simplified version of the A-Z alphabet for English. For example I would get rid of the letter "C" since the letters "K" and "S" can replace it. The Malaysians seems to agree with me. They love the letter "K" and "S" but hate the letter "C" it seems. Instead of "Clinic" I see "Klinik". They also do not like the letter "X" hence Taxi is spelled Teksi. "KS" can replace "X". In a simplified language, vowels would only make one sound. There would be no silent letters. No exceptions to the rules. No ambiguity.
Just because we can make the sound with our mouth does not mean it needs to be a part of our language. There are many sounds we can make that are not a part of languages. Imitate the sound of someone farting for example. That "fart sound" is not a part of any language as far I know.
It is my wish and prediction that we won't have to learn each others languages in the future since computers will do the translation for us. There is currently hand-held devices available for doing translation between the 10 most common languages. I saw it featured on the TV show Beyond Tomorrow but it is very expensive. You tell it what the source and destination language is then you speak into it and it display what you spoke in the source and destination language on the screen then it speaks the destination language.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/mandarin.html
about how China is pushing Mandarin to be the language of choice in the world. It's already the most popular language in the world.
Here's a quote: "The days of everyone trying to be American are over"
I've been trying to learn some Mandarin but it's hard and I'm just trying to pronounce simple things like "Good Morning" which sounds something like "Chow On". I can say the "Chow" part right but I have trouble saying "On" because it sounds more like "Awn" or "Aaun". No matter how many times they correct me, I can never get it right.
I'm planning to buy a book to help me learn some Mandarin but I'm wondering how a book is going to teach me how pronounce the word correctly.
Sometimes the Children like to have me say Chinese words. They get minutes of amusement as I mangle the words. They repeat, I repeat, they laugh.
I think Asian languages are inefficient because each word a symbol. I think letter-based languages are more efficient. Chinese uses different tones for different words. That's confusing and very frustrating to me when I pronounce the word correctly but in the wrong tone.
Letter based languages are certainly easier to type.
I was wondering how the Chinese type. Here is an example of a Chinese keyboard.
When I got my new PC I could toggle between Chinese and English keyboard input and sometimes it toggled on it's own and suddenly I was typing in Chinese and I saw that I got a pop-up showing many choices. This type of typing seemed quite slow to me.
I wonder how Chinese characters are stored in the PC. You cannot use ASCII (8 bits) since that only offers 256 choices. 16 bits offers 65,536 but is that enough to hold every Chinese character? I'm pretty sure the answer is no so the next step is 32 bits per character which gives you over 4 million (4,294,967,296) combos. I'm guessing there are less than 4 million Chinese characters and I'm wondering how the Chinese solved this problem back when we were using 16-bit computers.
The thought of learning Chinese actually frightens me. It's just so different to read, write and speak. But of course that's what the Chinese have to deal with when learning English.
English is not a great language either. If we're all going to speak one language, we should all speak Esperanto. That language has many advantages.
1. It is a neutral language, being the property of no particular group of people and therefore the equal property of everybody.
2. It is relatively easy to learn. It would appear from personal experience and anecdotal evidence that, for an English speaker, Esperanto is perhaps five times as easy to learn as Spanish, ten times as easy as Russian, and "considerably" easier than Chinese, Japanese or Arabic.
3. It's rules are very simple. Everything is spelled how it sounds. Letters only have one sound. There's one way to make a word plural or to make a word female or male gendered.
Strangely enough there are people who are against Esperanto. Here is a web page that explains why Esperanto is bad.
Here is a fun Esperanto tutorial. Here is The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9) written in Esperanto.
Here are the languages I've tried to learn. Esperanto has inspired me to invent my own language just for fun. I work on it in my free time. The words in my language will be generated from my simplified alphabet using a program I plan to write. The most common words people use will be the shortest words and the least common words will be the longest words. My language will be designed for speed of talking, writing and typing. It will be very condensed.
For a long time I've been coming up with a simplified version of the A-Z alphabet for English. For example I would get rid of the letter "C" since the letters "K" and "S" can replace it. The Malaysians seems to agree with me. They love the letter "K" and "S" but hate the letter "C" it seems. Instead of "Clinic" I see "Klinik". They also do not like the letter "X" hence Taxi is spelled Teksi. "KS" can replace "X". In a simplified language, vowels would only make one sound. There would be no silent letters. No exceptions to the rules. No ambiguity.
Just because we can make the sound with our mouth does not mean it needs to be a part of our language. There are many sounds we can make that are not a part of languages. Imitate the sound of someone farting for example. That "fart sound" is not a part of any language as far I know.
It is my wish and prediction that we won't have to learn each others languages in the future since computers will do the translation for us. There is currently hand-held devices available for doing translation between the 10 most common languages. I saw it featured on the TV show Beyond Tomorrow but it is very expensive. You tell it what the source and destination language is then you speak into it and it display what you spoke in the source and destination language on the screen then it speaks the destination language.
posted by Patrick Coston at 8:58 PM
1 Comments:
One quick thought about Chinese: Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series, has been working on a new game called Tabula Rosa. He wants to create a universal language that people can pick up quickly every where around the world. He found and early form of Chinese to be the best foundation to build his language becuase of how quickly people could recognize symbols without words or letters. On the other hand Chinese pictographs are inefficient because they lack phonetics. So he combined a bit of Korean in his language becaues it is almost purely about phonetics.
So there you go. If Richard Garriott has his way and Tabula Rosa takes off as much as Ultima or World of Warcraft did, then we all may be communicating via a Chinese/Korean language.
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