The Académie Française sometimes pushes for the replacement of anglicisms with French neologisms, as was the case with the replacement of "e-mail" or "mail" by "courriel" a few years ago. Sometimes, the government follows suit and mandates that official communications adopt the change.
I suppose that this could be interpreted as 'disallowing "franglais"', but your post is somewhat misleading. The media – newspapers, television, etc. – can say whatever the hell they want to, in whatever language they want to, and remain quite full of anglicisms, including "e-mail."
The french did pass a law about using french in official government publications, in all advertisements, in all workplaces, in commercial contracts, in some other commercial communication contexts, in all government-financed schools, and some other contexts:
I'd say the 1500s belonged to the Spanish, who lost it big, very big, and the French came soon afterward to fill the gap, until Berezina and Waterloo. I was very surprised when I first found that around 1800 France had a population of ~29 million while England only had ~8 million.
You're absolutely right about the Spanish, but it would be more appropriate to say the Hapsburgs, because what we're really talking about here is Spain, Austria-Hungry, the Balkans, The Holy Roman Empire... a huge portion of Europe all controlled centrally.
The French followed them, and for a period, the state of power was essentially France vs everyone else. England took off later, and that's the history most of us (Americans) are more familiar with.
BUT... this is a very Eurocentric view of history. There was a tremendous amount of other stuff going on leading up to and during this period in China, India, and what was once the Ottoman empire. In hindsight there are many reasons why our planet eventually became Eurocentric, but in 1500 that was not at all apparent - if things in China had gone differently; if they had not closed out new, outside, innovative ideas, we could very well have a very Chinese world today.
Another good book along this line is Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'. One of the theories he puts forward for China's failure to keep up with Europe is its homogeneity. The fact that there were so many different european countries competing against each other meant that none could afford to ignore new innovative ideas.
I find the whole "polluting French" absolutely hilarious in a historical context given that English was Germanic before it was "polluted" by French at the tip of a spear.
It seems to me like this has less to do with linguistic heritage and more to do with controlling people's ability to consume media from an English-tilted Internet.
Since most people never get far in foreign language classes, media exposure is a major factor in foreign language literacy.
Or it may be done so that people don't get to know how certain events or phenomena are named in English and therefore search for them in Chinese rather than in English, and get much more loyal-to-China results on average.
(1) Languages that borrow don't just borrow when they "need" to. For example, most languages have perfectly good ways to communicate "okay", but may borrow it nonetheless. But over time the borrowing may displace the native words or limit their applicability. The Chinese may be anxious that sinitic words will shrink in semantic scope once widespread borrowing takes over. This is not a disaster from a linguistic point of view, of course; it is just language change. But those that deem foreign borrowings illegitimate out of a sense of nationalism will be left with a sense of a shrinking language. Perhaps this is an element in the chauvinism you mentioned.
(2) In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes a language harder to learn, cf. English. I don't know if the Chinese government deserves credit for realizing this, though.
In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes a language harder to learn, cf. English.
That's an empirical claim. Is there any evidence to back that up? In particular, is there any standardized way to characterize which languages have more diverse etymologies and which have less? Is there a standardized way to compare the difficulty of learning languages as a second language in the abstract (as contrasted with the difficulty of learning some particular language given a particular first-language background)?
I get the distinct impression, from my acquaintance with people from all over the world, that many second-language learners think learning English is rather easy, not least because there are so very many opportunities to be exposed to English and to practice English all over the world.
Yes, Yes, and Yes. Languages and the relationships between them has received a lot of attention / study. Grated not all linguistic family's have received the same attention but there are thousands of reasonably distinct languages most of which have been reasonably well documented.
PS: Learning the language is not just about learning _ as a second language, primary schools spend a lot of time teaching the proper way to communicate. And English requires far more instruction time than some other closely related languages like Spanish.
In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes a language harder to learn, cf. English.
Interesting point. I wonder to what extent that would continue to be the case if words were regularized (with respect to conjugation and plurals, as well as with respect to spelling).
Strangely, I don't notice non-native speakers of English making spelling errors all that often.
Instead I notice them making the same grammatical errors over and over again. For instance Chinese speakers frequently mangle English plurals and omit articles "a" and "the".
So I think the hardest part of learning any language is always the grammar rather than the words, if the grammar differs from your native grammar. It's easy to map "aeroplane" to "avion" but much harder to map "the" to "le/la/l'/les/las" depending on context.
I think the hardest part of learning any language is always the grammar rather than the words, if the grammar differs from your native grammar.
That fits my experience as a foreign-language teacher (Chinese to native speakers of English, English to native speakers of various Sinitic languages and to speakers of Japanese, Biblical Hebrew in the medium of Modern Standard Chinese to Taiwanese persons of varying native languages, including one non-Sinitic native language). The categories that are hardest to notice in the acquired language are the categories that don't even exist in the speaker's native language. (For example, Chinese has neither number for nouns nor tense for verbs, nor does it have indefinite or definite articles, so native speakers of Chinese regularly confuse those issues in English.) This is especially so when the grammatical features are marked by phonological features that don't exist in the first language. Chinese does not have syllable-final consonant clusters, so a Chinese speaker's ear is not practiced in hearing those in other languages. So the difference between "fix" (present tense) and "fixed" past tense can be missed on TWO levels by a native speaker of Chinese learning English, as can the difference between "sixth" (singular) and "sixths" (plural).
Americans, of course, make a huge number of grammar mistakes when speaking Chinese, and rarely notice themselves doing so.
It's a neat theory, but it implies that the Chinese government has a bizarre plot to pretend to have national English-teaching programmes, but they know that these aren't really effective, and by censoring a few words online they can prevent anyone from actually learning English.
It's more likely that it is to do with linguistic heritage, cf the French.
Yes, actually because "national foreign literacy programs" are, more often than not, just covers for foreign government and foreign interests intervention.
It's not "public awareness" they raise (how condescending to think it takes a national foreign literacy program for the people to know what's happening in their country). They mainly act as hubs for foreign interest lackeys (disgruntled opposition leaders, shady figures and such), and propaganda.
Japan has a storied relationship with this question. My say-very-quietly-around-nationalists opinion is that the alphabet has become the fourth major writing system used in modern Japanese, via popular acclamation.
Not exactly relevant to the story, but this reminded me of something Aaron Sorkin wrote into the first series of The West Wing which has stuck with me since, and which I think is worthy of repeating even if the Chinese are banning English, rather than trying to make English the official language.
It's ludicrous to think that laws need to be created to help protect the language of Shakespeare.
I think the line was pointing out Shakespeare's tendency to just make up words and coin phrases as he needed. Had someone been "protecting" the language, the English language we know today would have been dramatically different.
> Do you have a logical or empirical basis for this statement, or is this an axiom for you?
Ignoring the passive-aggressiveness, yes, I have an empirical basis for this statement.
Don't you?
Ever heard of the "broken window" theory?
Ever heard of entropy?
Ever read the history of any cultural aspect, from poetry to jazz, to teaching, to coding?
Everything needs protection --people putting in the effort, care, education, craftsmanship and hard work to keep it alive, to improve it and to resist the tendency to decay and dillution.
I'll go with everything which you want to continue into the future needs caring for, but purity of the Chinese language seems like a strange thing to be optimizing for and expending effort on instead of, say population happiness or ability to trade with other countries or healthcare or whatever.
Who is keeping score on language purity and what makes it a metric worth doing well on?
Here, the geolocal minority language is Welsh. It is kept on life support by a smallish and dwindling number of native speakers (virtually no only-Welsh speakers remain, 600,000 people identify as Welsh speakers, but the Wikipedia article suspiciously avoids mentioning how many of those consider themselves 'fluent'), and a government mandate that all official documents, announcements, roadsigns / etc. must be in Welsh as well as English, and mandatory teaching at school.
I was wondering recently if it would be interesting to argue that forcibly teaching children a globally useless language for the sake of pleasing the adults who arbitrarily want it saved is a weak form of child abuse. It certainly isn't a form of educating children in a way that is in their best interest at least, which I'd think is a pretty strong heuristic for a useful education system.
The main out against that argument is that language education in school is so ineffective and accounts for such a small amount of time that it's hardly a thing worth complaining about against the backdrop of all the other things which could be improved.
A language is not only letters and words and syntax. It is also a cultural heritage. It is a way of thinking and a way of life codified.
> I was wondering recently if it would be interesting to argue that forcibly teaching children a globally useless language for the sake of pleasing the adults who arbitrarily want it saved is a weak form of child abuse.
Actually, killing the language and the culture of a child because it is "useless globally" is cultural genocide.
And it has happened way too much.
Now for people conditioned to think that "evolution" should be applied to human matters, culture, this might not seem much.
But go read the experiences of smaller cultures oppressed and eliminated by "global" or local mightier forces, and you can plainly see it's a different kind of holocaust.
I want ways of life to change, die and whither organically, by their own cultural momentum. Not by "global forces" and market influence. And surely not by cultural imperialism.
Actually, killing the language and the culture of a child because it is "useless globally" is cultural genocide.
I have no problem with that. Culture isn't something which suffers when you kill it, only humans/animals do. Trying to apply the horror that goes with the word "genocide" to killing "a language" isn't a clean argument.
Besides, I didn't mean mandate that nobody is allowed to speak it, and thus quickly finish it off, I meant do not mandate the use of it, and if it can't stay in use due to interested people choosing to learn and use it, then let it fade away.
But go read the experiences of smaller cultures oppressed and eliminated by "global" or local mightier forces, and you can plainly see it's a different kind of holocaust.
It isn't any kind of holocaust unless the people are slaughtered. "Nobody knits jumpers, cooks or speaks in the age old traditional ways anymore, they all sold out to factories and convenience, waah" is not a cause I can work up much sympathy for. If you like cooking, knitting, speaking in those ways then do it. But there's nothing inherently great about traditional ways, so if nobody can be bothered then it's better to leave them to history than to life support them.
Ever heard of the "broken window" theory? Ever heard of entropy? Ever read the history of any cultural aspect, from poetry to jazz, to teaching,
Yes, some things, those that are vulnerable, need protection. The Bengal tiger needs protection. The tribal languages in the Amazon need protection. English is in no way vulnerable, so it really doesn't need any protection.
On the other hand, maybe you need to read the history of how English evolved into what it is today. It certainly isn't because of prescriptivist nonsense like "protect[ing]" the language from "decay and dilution".
to coding?
Funny you mention that -- one programming language that's been "protect[ed]" from "decay and dilution" a lot is Java, and look what a boring, unimaginative cesspool that's become.
> Funny you mention that -- one programming language that's been "protect[ed]" from "decay and dilution" a lot is Java, and look what a boring, unimaginative cesspool that's become.
Huh? Java "protected from decay and dilution"?
Witch the exception of SUN never liking native interface linking, Java was ANYTHING BUT protected from decay. Java went about adding and adopting stuff, from Swing to generics to annotations to functional stuff, to remoting, to various EE fads of the day, without ever thinking about whats best about the core language and how to keep it clean and agile.
I would have liked it if in place of Java we had a purer language, like, say, Smalltalk.
Compare Java to C#. C# was originally a Java clone, but the designers liberally borrowed from everywhere, worrying about actual use cases and not purity of any sort. Today C# is at the boundary between mainstream and academic programming. (It has monads for God's sake. They don't call it monads, of course. They call it LINQ.)
Java? It added generics after C# did, and only now is it finally going to add proper closures.
Can some words even be expressed in 'pure Chinese'? I see in foreign (primarily spanish-speaking) papers all the time that they have loan-words or just straight up use many of the technical words that English developed.
Are all pretty much exactly the same in Spanish as English. To remove the 'English' there... well you need to make up totally new words then. Seems a difficult problem.
Note: I'm not even great at English some days, and know little about Chinese.
It's difficult to get a sense of Chinese zeitgeist without actually going to China. There's a certain je ne sais quoi to the ethnic unity that can be established through the unique commonality of a language, and the Chinese government is undertaking this linguistic jujitsu in order to preserve that.
I have to admire your use of a French loan phrase in your English-language reply about Chinese language policy. What's really astounding about China (as compared, say to Taiwan) is the huge number of people there who are still not conversant in Modern Standard Chinese.
The progress of a common language in China has been remarkably slow, doubtless because the wretched poverty of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution periods slowed development of telephony and internal travel, which do much to build a common language in any country. (The United States population is made up of not more than about 25 percent persons of English-speaking ancestry, but English has been the common language of the country even in peak periods of immigration, and even when American-born persons, such as both of my maternal grandparents, could receive their entire primary education in a non-English language--German in their case.) But if commonality of a language is the concern, it doesn't really matter whether or not Modern Standard Chinese of the 21st century has lots of English loanwords or only just a few. The issue is whether everyone living in China has much opportunity to communicate with one another freely and to travel readily.
The German was seamless (thanks for pointing it out) and the Japanese I took to be a reference (then used metaphorically) to the actual Japanese practice, and thus not as jarringly noticeable in the sentence. But touché for writing a reply in which both the message and the medium were the message.
I shared a dorm with a lot of native Spanish speakers and were surprised to hear them use the English word weapon to refer to the weapons in first-person shooter games. For example to describe the railgun in Quake: "este weapon es muy lento".
Native spanish speaker here. If you are used to see the word in Englsh, you may even forget what is the word in Spanish. Also, people from Spain are more careful about preserving the language, people from other spanish speaking countries not so much. Spanish speakers living in the US, use Spanglish all the time.
The short answer is yes, with abbreviations being possible exceptions. "Internet" and "World Wide Web" already have Chinese counterparts. Other words will just be phonetically similar Chinese phrases, similar to how we write "Beijing" instead of "北京".
Yes it's possible. just don't go trying to translate english contractions into other languages. They may not always fit. probably sometimes.
And the opposite is also true. Other languages may have some pretty cool contractions for some stuff, that in english we are left with two or three descriptive words put together to get any sense.
The link is to the BBC, but this story is in the US newspapers today as well. The irony there is that plenty of Americans seem to want exactly this, and perhaps more, from their government as well. Yet it's portrayed as a negative in the English-speaking press.
I don't think so, English incorporates words from other languages all the time. I think there are Americans that are against things being written in foreign languages, but not against incorporating foreign words as part of the English vocabulary.
Indeed, the linguist Ronald Wardhaugh shows in his historical studies that one of the reasons English has won out over French as a world language is that English makes no attempt to be "pure" but rather adapts to how speakers use it, making it more user-friendly as a second language for speakers around the world.
Some countries have a linguistic policy that limits this, European Portuguese (this is not generally the case in Brazilian Portuguese), Icelandic and French for example.
Given that English in its earliest intelligible form is a merger between Old English and Norman French, I'm not really sure what English with loan words removed would sound like. Probably like Beowulf, and I'm sure I couldn't understand it.
English is a great language (though a very hard one to learn) precisely because it's cobbled together from bits of other languages. If another language has a word for a concept we're missing then we just acquire the word.
So if your friend gets drunk on tequila and vodka and eats too much foie gras and winds up with a tattoo of a voodooshaman holding a katana in a sauna dancing the hula with a walrus then by all means you can feel schadenfreude about it.
Which is all very well until you're playing Scrabble and your letters spell all sorts of pronouncable wordshaped sequences which you are sure must mean something to someone... but then they aren't allowed. :-/
Problem is that it can be fashionable in Chinese to use English to show you are educated. I imagine they want to avoid this kind of thing happening in the mainland:
Personally, I liked the sign that got translated as "Translation Server Error"
But there's a ton of misuse on both sides. God help you if you believe that there's a "Chinese alphabet" that things like initials can be translated into (http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/ has a long list of tattoo victims of that gibberish "Asian font"), but there's plenty of the reverse, too. I still haven't tried "Pocari Sweat" (a common sports drink that doesn't sound very appetizing; there should be pictures of it on engrish.com among other places).
The French tried to do this with the French language but failed. The most obvious success story is the Japanese language's katakana syllabury that allows English words to be written and/or abbreviated in japanese. For the Japanese, 99.9% of post-war technical words are written in Japanese katakana but then the Japanese have always had a history of successfully adopting and adapting.
This seems like a great mechanism for the populous to protest against the government. Casually and habitually using forbidden words will demonstrate and communicate their dissatisfaction and because it isn't a serious crime it can flourish and overtime erode authority and popular support. An own goal.
How might they be detrimental? My Korean acquisition is being greatly sped up by it's large number of English and Chinese loan words. Korean grammar is notoriously difficult already even with the loan words. Having 50% of all the new vocabulary be somewhat recognizable makes not only memorization easier, it makes it possible to sometimes understand words I haven't encountered before. It's definitely been a great aid in getting fluent in Korean.
"It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
One of the most insightful sentences I've ever read. IMHO, non-European languages only have rough equivalents for Renaissance concepts like equality, democracy, scientific inquiry etc (yeah yeah, I know Greece had a so-called democracy; I'm talking about our modern-day understanding of these concepts). Blocking the precise word from being used in Chinese may be a mind-control trick.
I'm confused about your parenthetical Greek remark. Isn't ancient Greek a European language, and doesn't our actual word "democracy" come directly from it?
And I'm not so sure that their concept of the meaning of "democracy" was significantly different to ours, even though there were significant differences for how it went on in practice.
What I meant is that in Greece only a few people voted (IIRC women and slaves weren't allowed to vote), so it wasn't close to our current understanding of democracy. Unless I'm mistaken and Greece had universal adult franchise.
And hence supporting my claim that "democracy" is a Renaissance concept rather than an ancient Greek concept.
In numerous countries, and some states in the US, convicted felons who have completed their sentence are not allowed to vote. Are those not democracies as we currently understand it?
For that matter, ALL countries that I am aware of that allow their citizens to vote set an arbitrary 'magic number' and don't let you vote unless you are at least that old. Are those not democracies as we currently understand it?
In the United States, non-citizen residents are not allowed to vote. How is this any different from the ancient Greeks not allowing non-citizen residents to vote? Their democracy was not at all that different from our democracies today, it is the definition of "full citizen" that has changed.
Rennaisance? Even the most advanced modern democracies generally didn't give women the vote until the late 1800s.
(Switzerland didn't have it until 1971, and is still one of the most prosperous and peaceful countries on Earth. Germany granted women the vote in 1918, and we all know how that worked out...)
No, the distinction is that the Athenian democracy was a direct democracy where every citizen could vote on legislation, as opposed to representative democracy where representatives vote in a legislature. The US was a democracy, albeit imperfect, even when slaves and women couldnt vote. There are still some remnants of direct democracy: ballot measures and New England town meetings.
This seems like a par for the course from a nation that looked until the 1500s like it would be the dominant world power before it turned inward.