Side note: I didn't know Google had their own TLD. Is this new? Seems weird that an organization has that ability to do that.
Cern has one too: https://home.cern
Why did CERN spend $185,000 plus labor on a TLD?
The New Wave of Indian Type
101–110 of 190 posts
Re: The New Wave of Indian Type
#102> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…
Why fetishize diversity for its own sake, especially when it's a barrier to communication? I think we should all speak one language (preferably, the one we're speaking now). The information suddenly marketable to or directly consumable by anyone at any given place will significantly increase.
"We should also have one programming language, one processor architecture (preferably the x86-64) and one browser"
If the above statement sounds wrong, it's because __it is__
We should let other cultures and languages to thrive by themselves; as this is the primary reason of evolution of our business language too. If multiple languages would not suddenly exist, our business language will stop borrowing from other languages and would cease to advance by itself.
Re: The New Wave of Indian Type
#103This is the first time I've ever seen this construction (using "that's" instead of "whose" as a relative possessive pronoun): "...the ongoing use of English, a language that's reach and influence has grown considerably..."
That's not very typical. (Pun intended, and John Clarke reference intended too.) It was just a mistake. Given the topic, it's possible that that was written by someone who's not a native speaker - but whose writing is otherwise very good. (And arguably better than that showoff sentence!) As you noted, a native American English speaker would write "...a language whose reach..." And that's that. RIP John Clarke: https:…
Contractions in vernacular American English are such a shitshow and getting worse all the time, that I'm not sure any guardians of proper usage can stand against the tide.
Re: The New Wave of Indian Type
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
These mostly get called “dialects” for political reasons: the Chinese government doesn’t want to acknowledge that they are separate mutually unintelligible languages. Media in Chinese languages other than Mandarin is restricted, children are forced to use Mandarin in school, all official business is done in Mandarin, etc. There is a concerted effort to make other languages economically unviable, and generally to dise…
> the Chinese government doesn’t want to acknowledge that they are separate mutually unintelligible languages. Except they are not mutually unintelligible. Put someone from heilongjiang province in Sichuan and they will still be able to understand the language, albeit with more difficulty. Though there are dialects that do have completely different pronunciation, they all use the same underlying script , save a selec…
Heilongjiang is part of the Northeast, aka former Manchuria and was settled in the mid to late 1800s from the North Chinese plain. The entire North Chinese plain speaks variants of Mandarin for the same reason North American English is far less diverse than British and Irish English, there was a relatively small recent founder population.
Wu (Shanghainese and the other related dialects of the Yangtze river delta), Yue (Cantonese), Hakka, Xiang and Min are absolutely languages. They're at least as divergent as the Romance languages or the different "dialects" of Arabic. Having a single written standard does not make the spoken varieties one language. And even if it did Cantonese has a written standard even if it's not used much, so there are at least two Chinese languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_varieties_of_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese
Re: The New Wave of Indian Type
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why fetishize diversity for its own sake, especially when it's a barrier to communication? I think we should all speak one language (preferably, the one we're speaking now). The information suddenly marketable to or directly consumable by anyone at any given place will significantly increase.
The moment that happens, that language would start diverging again. You have to unify culture in order to unify language, and that doesn't sound as good anymore. Settling on a "common" or "business" language, though, is entirely possible, and has been done many times in history. No language ever encompassed the whole world, and if one language has it's English, right now. Latin, Arabic, Mandarin, French, English, Spa…
Point in case - proto Indo European language. It's clear most of European languages (except pre-Indo-European, like Finnish, Estonian, Basque..) have common parent language. For example, look at numbers. All those languages have awfully familiar numbers. If you speak one language, you can recognise most numbers in other languages rather easily. Yet they evolved into very different languages in different regions.
Re: The New Wave of Indian Type
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
These mostly get called “dialects” for political reasons: the Chinese government doesn’t want to acknowledge that they are separate mutually unintelligible languages. Media in Chinese languages other than Mandarin is restricted, children are forced to use Mandarin in school, all official business is done in Mandarin, etc. There is a concerted effort to make other languages economically unviable, and generally to dise…
However, it's worth noting that you call the official language of China "Mandarin" for political reasons. The analogy would be if you called French "Bureaucratese" and said "Yes, but Breton and Occitan are not mutually intelligible with Bureaucratese". The statements "Bureaucratese is not mutually intelligible with Occitan" and "Mandarin is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese" are both true, but we could just sa…
I could call it Beijingese (or Pekingese) if you prefer. But many people might not know what I was talking about. Mandarin is the common name used in English to refer to this language.
I don’t have any problem if you want to talk about Parisian French (or pick your preferred other name for it), Castilian Spanish, etc.
Parisian French was pushed onto the people within the borders of the French nation-state by force, by a brutal authoritarian monarchy. Quoting Wikipedia,
‘The goals of the Public School System were made especially clear to the French speaking teachers sent to teach students in regions such as Occitania and Brittany; “And remember, Gents: you were given your position in order to kill the Breton language” were instructions given from a French official to teachers in the French department of Finistère (western Brittany).’
The French state continues to repress minority languages inside its borders. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_France
Re: The New Wave of Indian Type
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
China does have very diverse dialects. But Mandarin is taught in all schools in mainland China and we treat it as standard. Also it is the unified way people from different area communicate. For younger generation this is not a problem, back in my college life where people in the same class came from different areas, from Xinjiang to Canton to the northeast corner. We have no problem understanding each other though s…
And what are called "dialects" in the Chinese context are just as much dialects as French, Italian, and Romanian are "dialects" of Romance.
While this might be true for spoken language, luckily the Chinese writing system does represent how the the words are pronounced. All of these "dialects" share the same writing system. So it's much easier for someone speaking one of these dialects to learn and use Mandarin.
Re: The New Wave of Indian Type
#108> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…
We have a saying in Hindi which translate into this.
> " kos kos par badle paani,chaar kos par baani, par ek hai jo nahi badalta vo hai Hindustani"
Rough Translation:
> Taste of water changes every 2 miles, language changes every 4 miles, but Indian still don't change.
Re: The New Wave of Indian Type
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what are called "dialects" in the Chinese context are just as much dialects as French, Italian, and Romanian are "dialects" of Romance.
These mostly get called “dialects” for political reasons: the Chinese government doesn’t want to acknowledge that they are separate mutually unintelligible languages. Media in Chinese languages other than Mandarin is restricted, children are forced to use Mandarin in school, all official business is done in Mandarin, etc. There is a concerted effort to make other languages economically unviable, and generally to dise…
I don't see any part of your comment being correct.
First of all, "Mandarin" is spoken not only in China mainland, but also the standard in Singapore and Taiwan. It was a creation by the Republic of China (which later became Taiwan government) back in 1923, long before the current Chinese government came into power.
Children use Mandarin in school because they have to learn it to be able to communicate with people coming from other parts of China, which would have become a huge disadvantage to themselves. (I can't imagine how I would communicate with other people in college otherwise) It doesn't mean people will forget how to speak their own dialect. In fact, people from the same region almost always speak their own dialects.
Regional / minority cultures are generally protected by the government. The minority are almost always over-represented in all kinds of national events. Being a minority in China means you can get tons of advantage (lower score required to enter good colleges, financial aid, etc.)
Re: The New Wave of Indian Type
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
These mostly get called “dialects” for political reasons: the Chinese government doesn’t want to acknowledge that they are separate mutually unintelligible languages. Media in Chinese languages other than Mandarin is restricted, children are forced to use Mandarin in school, all official business is done in Mandarin, etc. There is a concerted effort to make other languages economically unviable, and generally to dise…
I don't see any part of your comment being correct. First of all, "Mandarin" is spoken not only in China mainland, but also the standard in Singapore and Taiwan. It was a creation by the Republic of China (which later became Taiwan government) back in 1923, long before the current Chinese government came into power. Children use Mandarin in school because they have to learn it to be able to communicate with people co…
The language we call Mandarin has been the native language of some parts of northern China for thousands of years, and was certainly not “created” any time recently. Some people speaking dialects of that language migrated to other parts of China. But there are various other languages natively spoken elsewhere in the country.
Singapore is a cosmopolitan port city, there are several Chinese languages spoken there, and Mandarin was not the dominant one until recently. There are also many other languages spoken in Singapore, and from what I understand English is the primary language used for official business. Taiwan was not natively Mandarin speaking but speaks it now because it was taken over (from the Japanese) by the fleeing Mandarin-speaking KMT after they were beaten militarily by the Communists during the Chinese Civil War. Both Singapore and Taiwan were ruled for decades by authoritarian governments. I’m not sure about Singapore but in Taiwan other Chinese languages were forcefully suppressed.
Plenty of other parts of the world manage to communicate across regional/national borders without restricting people’s ability to produce/distribute local media in their native languages.
There are many countries where students learn several languages in school (including their native regional language and a national language) from an early age.
(Disclaimer again: I’m not an expert in the history, politics, or comparative linguistics of China. I recommend Wikipedia as a better first summary, if you are curious to learn about these subjects.)