my main intention is to shift our attention from what the 10% of the aggresive population is doing in each country to the true aspiration of the peace loving 90% who may very well want to erase the stupid national boundaries.
*individual effort can be significant: 1.broke export license restriction, allowed taiwan to break out technologically. 2.tzung risked, mao holding on to life, while chou en lai down were ready to put tzung on trial. then nothing would happen.
*my qualification:software automation(retired at 41),import supercomputers to taiwan,natural language programming, making technology trivial, which is important to fend off west's technological aggression.
*china century implication: world unification thru cultural unification thru language unification. 1st is improbable, but last is probable.
* trash english to allow everyone to communicate.
Last time I counted, China has two languages. While this happens at a time when China is in desperate need of another language for her technology development.
I am referring to the two types of written characters, and the adoption of English for technology catchup with the developed nations.
I consider myself to be in a unique position to commend on this topic, since I don't write Chinese and the little English I know has been the single most important factor in my success in technology as a Chinese.
Not being able to write in Chinese, what I see from the outside is a very wasteful, if not laughable, situation. Is China going to pass down to all her future generations two different written languages, pitting against each other to serve the same identical function? Is the simplied one here to stay just for the purpose of trashing the most precious of all Chinese culture, that is her written characters?
Simplifying the language sends a signal to the people to simplify the culture.
Yes, I agree that on the other extreme of the issue of the non-cultural technology, we do need to simplify. But it's the technology-oriented English, not Chinese, which has historically been the single greatest obstacle to China's technological advancement. English as a alphabet or representative language lends better to abstract thinking and presentation.
We need to include as a subset of our Chinese language a grammarless, non-spoken, filtered, truncated(to 6 letters), 1000-words English vocabulary, geared specifically for technical application on the computer.
Such a set could also serve as a universal language for all other non-English-speaking countries, who like China has been economically discriminated from entering the English-dominated technology market places. A big bonus of learning this simplified English is that it automatically turns a person into a computer user. This will erase the digital divide.
This is high time to put words into action. And long pain not, rather short pain.
********************************************************** Sorry, you idea is strange. 1. With 1000-words English vocabulary you can do nothing. To exchange ideas (and in case of technology and science this is very important) you need several 1000 words, otherwise it is impossible to exchange ideas, which is the base for technical progress in every country. 2. Why not translating new English tech-words into Chinese. Thats the way it functioned around the world thru several centuries. 3. Are you sure that English will be always the dominant language? Look back in history. The first half of the 20. century German was the world dominant languange is technic, science, law, etc. Things are changing. Who knows, perhaps in 50 years Chinese will the dominant language or Russion. Nobody knows now.
So let the Chinese learn Chinese first (including technical Chinese) and then one or two foreign languages. Thats the way we Europeans are acting. *************************************************888 It is not two languages. Some of the simplified characters already existed in the form of hand-written abbreviations. In order to facilitate learning and reduce illiteracy (90%? when the PRC was founded) the government felt it was necessary to simplify some of the complex and difficult characters. Many of the hand-written simplified characters became legitimate plus more. The simplified characters are only a subset of the original, not a wholesale replacement of the entire character set. For people who already know how to write Chinese characters, it is not much a problem to become familiarized with the simplified characters. For people who can't read and write Chinese yet, it may appear to be learning the language with twice the effort. When Taiwan is reunited, they would most probably adopt the simplified characters as well. Then, the old complex characters would fade away. Language is changing just like everything else.
English is already one of the required foreign languages for Chinese college graduation. Most college students already know some English and in various degrees can use the internet in English. English grammar and usage are the difficult part for Chinese students.
Chinese will become the most common internet language because China's internet users are growing faster than any other country. With digitized voice, may be someday it could become practical not to use the keyboard as much. You just speak to the computer to issue your commands and/or write your essay and emails. When that becomes a practical reality, it doesn't matter much what shapes the characters have anymore.
****************************************************** Join the club of Esperanto advocates [Man26]Posted at 2005-06-25 20:51:22 Another artificial language that was supposed to make things easier
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