English Doomed as Global Language, Academic Says

[FBM]

No doubt we're not going to get there anytime soon, Universal Translator-wise... for the life of me I can't imagine non-human language, produced by non-human (non-terrestrial) minds and vocal organs. And yes, there's too much ambiguity and whatnot in common speech... I am tricked by people's choice of words all the time, and for fear of sounding like a bloody luddite: I'd like to see a machine do better ;P

Tip o' the iceberg. Imagine trying to develop voice recognition software that could recognize all the local and regional Scottish, Afhanisatani, Australian, Korean, El Salvadoran, etc, pronunciations. Just between Tennessee and Pennsylvania people there's a lot of 'What?'. Even without the colloquialisms, slang, idioms, sarcasm, irony, etc, imagine trying to develop a program that could decipher with equal accuracy Mississippi, New York, Boston, LA, Texas, Brisbane, Scotland, Capetown, etc, accents within the same freaking language. It just ain't gonna happen in this or the next lifetime.

[Eriku]

No need to tell me... Noggies don't have to go far to hear the words change around them either... Dialectical variation is of course another huge one, though I'm not sure that kind of specificity is required for this thing to be considered a success, but yeah, tons of little things that could throw the software off, and which regularly do throw off native speakers each day.

[Svartalf]

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Wrong bet... Chinese is more likely than Korean

[Svartalf]

You don't buy into his Star Trek Universal Translator prediction?

By the time we have teleporters able to transfer complex organisms, maybe... modern computer science just can't replicate the heuristics of colloquial language yet

[FBM]

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Wrong bet... Chinese is more likely than Korean

It's a Korean advertisement for a Chinese language course.

Anyway, the problem of inputting Chinese characters into writing software programs in insurmountable, I think. Korean has a very simple writing system (ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ...), which makes phonetically spelling out the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese loan-words it uses quite routine. Maybe if they could combine Chinese spoken language with Korean software, it could work.

[Svartalf]

Yes, I've read that already... but I'd like to know how anglicized computer using Japanese are before evaluation the relevance of that argument.
And IIRC, the Hangul are a syllabary (like the Japanese Kana), which mmeans it's still more complicated for keyboard input than a western style alphabet.

[Hermit]

You don't buy into his Star Trek Universal Translator prediction?

I do. The speed with which software advances in sophistication and hardware becomes faster and more capacious will keep accelerating exponentially. Babel fish is closer than most people imagine. In fifty or a hundred years the globe's networked computers' intelligence will have surpassed ours by so much that it will hardly deign to communicate with us. We will have lost control of those computers to the extent that we won't even be able to pull the plug on them.

Back to the global language issue: After allowing for some lag, dominant languages have always been those of economically and politically dominant cultures, and they have sunk into relative oblivion soon after those cultures ceased to be dominant. Is there such a thing as Chinese language? I thought most Chinese spoke either Mandarin or Cantonese. Perhaps the language can be phonetisised and squeezed into a couple of dozen characters. Alternatively, we may just have to learn the Chinese 20,000 character set in order to avoid being sent to economic, political and social Coventry until some other culture takes over dominance from China.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I for one welcome the rule of our lizard overlords and shall learn their tongue (oer missus) at the earliest opportunity

[FBM]

Yes, I've read that already... but I'd like to know how anglicized computer using Japanese are before evaluation the relevance of that argument.
And IIRC, the Hangul are a syllabary (like the Japanese Kana), which mmeans it's still more complicated for keyboard input than a western style alphabet.

Of the three writing systems in Japanese, hiragana and kanji are governed by exactly the same limitations as Chinese. Katagana characters are limited enough to fit on a standard keyboard. The software automatically arranges the characters into syllables according to set spelling rules, so no extra work is required to do that.

Hangul (한글) is the name of the whole writing system of Korean, not individual characters. Each character represents an individual sound, not an entire syllable, unlike hiragana. If you want to type 'go', for example, you first hit ㄱ and then ㅏ. It appears on the screen as 가. No different from typing g and then o.

Because it's based on phonetics, the characters you type match the pronunciation (with a few exceptions in consonant assimilations and a couple of syllable-final consonants). No unpronounced letters or variations based on historical accident or regional variations. What you see is what you get. If I take a sentence in any other language, say Russian or Swahili, and represent it orthographically in Hangul, the person reading the Hangul aloud would produce a very close match to the original spoken by the Russian or Swahili person. It would be easily understandable.

Learning to type in Korean is no harder than learning to type in English. All the characters fit on the keyboard very nicely, and the wpm count of comparably-trained touch-typists are very similar. I touch-type in both languages. My English typing is naturally faster because I learned it in high school, not because of any inherent limitation in the language or the computer's ability to process it. 이걸 봐. 쉽지. 응 마자. 쉬워. Easy.

The major limitation of 한글 is no different from that of most any other language; that it lacks some of the sounds that other languages have. In spoken Korean there's no /z/, for example, so there's no written representation for it. They substitute the phonetically closest already-existing character they have, in this case either ㅈ or sometimes ㅉ. That's a well-known problem in orthography almost regardless of which two languages are involved, though. It's not particular to Korean.

[hadespussercats]

I admit I don't know squat about this subject, so forgive a possibly stupid question:
Is English, as arguably the most common language of software engineers, at all embedded in the structure/syntax of coding?

[Svartalf]

FBM. Only kanji have the Chinese limitation, both kana systems are on a par, since both have exactly the same number of characters and are exactly parallel, just with separate applications.

and so I was mistaken about hangul, OK

[FBM]

You're right about hiragana being on a par with katagana. Hangul is still superior to either as an orthographic tool, as the consonants and vowels are separate and can make many more combinations, whether they occur naturally in spoken Korean or not. Anyway, it's not like we're going to establish a new global language here on Ratz, is it?

[Warren Dew]

I think this guy's claim is not that English will be replaced, but that we'll enter a period with no global language at all.

English's best hope probably lies in India, where there are more English users than the rest of the world put together.

[Coito ergo sum]

From a sociological perspective, the age of the Internet put English in a similar position to the one Latin faced when printing technology was developed. The printing press boosted demand for books in local languages and accelerated the fall of Latin. By the same token, the past decade saw an explosion of languages other than English across the web, such as Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish.

This sort of jumped out at me and made me think the writer in the OP was talking out of his ass.

Gutenberg's printing press was developed in the early 1400's as I recall. Latin was basically already a dead language by around 800. None of the local Europeans could understand vulgar latin spoken in church. It was right about this time that languages like Spanish, Italian, French, etc., started becoming recognizable. So, I mean - by the 1400's, other than ecclesiastical things, the latin language hadn't been used for at least 600 years and probably was pretty uncommon from about 700-800 years.

So, query - how did the printing press accelerate the fall of a long dead language?

[Svartalf]

Err, Coito, You know that Latin was still the major language for international scientific publications in the early 1800s?
Latin remained an indispensable language for the literate centuries (heck, a millenium), after it died as a spoken language for the common people... it remained as the basic language of diplomacy and international communication until the 1500s, possibly the late 1600s... and still is the official language of the Vatican and the last resort when prelates lack Italian or any other common languages.

What really buried Latin was not printing, though, it was the rise of the bourgeoisie as a wealthy class that could afford learning to read without becoming Churchment. Those were the people, illiterate in Latin, who created a demand for books written/printed in a language they could read.