Will we need to learn Chinese to use the Internet?
"China gained 36 million additional internet users last year meaning there are now over 440 million internet users in the country. English has long been the most widely used language on the internet but with Chinese Internet growth rising at the rate it is, it could be less than five years before Chinese becomes the dominant language on the internet."
http://thenextweb.com/asia/2010/12/21/chinese-the-new-dominant-language-of-the-internet-infographic/
http://thenextweb.com/asia/2010/12/21/chinese-the-new-dominant-language-of-the-internet-infographic/
Comments
Based on my experiences with any kind of tech support these days, I'm guessing India has also added a lot of internet users, too.
A number of serch providors are pulling their support for Chinese internet as well.
Not to worry, most Chinese traffic goes through eBay anyway.
I wouldn't worry too much about Chinese quickly becoming the dominant language on the internet for awhile, but there is indeed an 'Asian Language Barrier' in the digital world. While a few years back, the internet was globalizing the world, it seems now that the internet is being regionalized. M$ Windows has definitely struggled with a separate Asian version of its OS until recently, mainly because of Unicode filenames were not easy to implement in the West - ASCII was the legacy and too much software relied on it. So Unicode file searches had to have a special feature for older ASCII file names. And so, programmers and development software often still prefer file names and extensions in ASCII or at least alphabetical representation.
Could you handle file names and extensions is Chinese characters? How about programing C or Python in Chinese characters representing everything? Can you write a compiler or assembler in Chinese characters? In other words, the linguistics of computer languages is preserving ASCII usage for compactness and by traditional conventions of meaning. Imagine looking for a bug that is a mere typo of a Chinese character.
The whole thing is a numbers game. It is generally accepted that there are roughly 7000 individual Chinese characters, while the English alphabet has a mere 26 do to phonological representation - so bytes can't represent Chinese. This is a great divide between phonologically represented languages and visual character based languages. Even file names require 16 bit Unicode rather than 8bit ASCII.
The 26 character alphabet made the computer successful as 8 bits (actually 7 bits) can easily represent both lower and upper case and include numbers. On the other hand, Chinese has no capitalization and until recent times, no true punctuation. It was only until the recent ability to deploy Unicode that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean really joined the computer mainstream. But as you can imagine, a 16bit character system requires a lot more time to search and sort data on an 8 bit machine - maybe twice as slow?
As far as input, I have a Chinese/English keyboard with symbols for phonetic Chinese input (in BPMF or BoPoMoFo) and in replication of Chinese characters (in Tsang Jie input). If one learns to really use the keyboard, it can be just as fast as western typing.
BPMF is rather slow and since you must know the phonetics of every character you want, it requires complete knowledge of Chinese phonology - not something that is easily achieved by even native Chinese as dialects often modified phonology. Since there are vast numbers of homophones, one has to page through all the sound-alike characters in order to get to the right one. That slows things down, even if there is intelligent guessing by the computer.
Tsang Jie input is about the best and fastest system and one can become a touch typist in a few months if one already can touch type in English. The fundamental concept is that any Chinese character can be represented in 5 or less keystrokes. I've learned it and use it. One could even say it is fun and helpful to one studying Chinese. The big advantage is that I need NOT know the sound or the meaning of the character in order to enter it from the keyboard. I just rely on the system to bring up a duplicate of the character I need to input in either Simplified or Traditional Chinese. Since it forces me to notice and visualize the character in detail it is good for enhancing recall.
On a related front, Japanese has two systems of language representation - one based on Chinese characters as Japanese originally did not have a written language - then adopted Chinese characters learned from the migration of Buddhist monks to Japan (circa 600-700A.D.) and the other is phonological that was created in modern times. Often the two are mixed together. Though Japanese uses Traditional Chinese characters for representation, the actual meaning of the character can be quite different in the Japanese lexicon - it would be a big mistake to try to transfer meanings back and forth between the two.
The real clincher is that any program written in Unicode would initially take two times the storage space as it would be 16 bit characters rather than 8 bit. And then of course, it take twice as long to search and sort unless the machine is 16bit or better.
Frankly, I worry more about everyone forgetting their written language and expecting snipettes from their iPhones posted on YouTube to become the norm of communication. Or that SMS is destroying traditional writing skills.
Finally, Chinese is 'phonetically closed' to the outside world. And so we have names translated into Chinese phonology rather than merely inserted as is. Try 'Ni ka jin men', for instance. What exactly does that mean in Chinese - Nicole Kiddman. Apples versus oranges across the board.
Thanks for providing your perspective, Loopy. It's been very interesting.