The Internet Shifts East

Logic Bomb writes: "The San Francisco Chronicle has an article discussing the World Intellectual Property Organization's prediction that in less than 10 years, Chinese will be the most widely-used language on the web. Assuming the Internet becomes a truly global entity, this is an obvious (and mathematically correct) conclusion. On the other hand, the implementation of the Internet in places without certain civil liberties provides an interesting challenge to typical Western (idealist) notions about what the Internet does for society. Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'? And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?"

Re:There may be a lot of tea in China...

[tin_the_fatty]

Having used a prepaid-dialup-top-up ISP card in Southern China a few weeks back, I can confirm that the dialup server gives out non-routable IP numbers (i.e. 192.168.X.X), and I expect most ISPs in China to do the same thing regarding dialup and ADSL users.

So, yes I agree we would be better off going IPv6, but no we could make do for a few years to come.

A little history lesson

[autopr0n]

Actually, after Mao died the Deng Xiaoping and his cohorts were pretty freaked out by what happened and they began to liberalize (in the British sense of the word... like free markets and the like) both economically (Deng actually had a slogan "It's not bad to get rich") and politically. But the Tiananmen Square massacre scared them shitless, especially when people other then students began to get involved. It was suppressed. And given the background (having experienced china in the 1940s and through Mao's crap... Deng had to endure a couple of struggle sessions himself) It's easy to see why they might have been afraid.

The problem is that when China looked around them to see what was successful they saw the Authoritarian capitalist states like Singapore, Korea and Taiwan. And they figured that it worked well. Taiwan has become a real democracy now though.

I think after the shock of Tiananmen wares off and things start to calm down again the restrictions will once again start to come off. Well I hope. Unlike Singapore, it's a pretty big country to hold with an iron fist.

According to Accenture, it will... but earlier

[DavidpFitz]

Accenture [accenture.com] -- formerly Andersen Consulting -- reckon this will happen by 2007 [accenture.com]. It's worth a read... especially the links at the bottom talking about cultural pollution (not necessarily in a negative sense!)

They're not often wrong.

The figures reckon that one billion people in China will be connecting to the Web by the year 2007. It sounds a it optomistic to me, and what exactly does "connecting to the web" mean. Someone who owns a PC and is connected... or just someone who uses a CyberCafe? I wonder if in China "people per IP" would be much higher than in Europe or America.

No

[autopr0n]

The vast majority of computers in china use Qwerty keyboards. Then an intelligent layer between the raw input and the application converts it into Kanji or whatever. They even work on context (at least the Microsoft software I have does). so if you type in "shi" you might get 'is', but if you type in "shi jian" the first "shi" will be the word for 'time'.

If you have a higher-end Nokia phone you know what that's like. You can type regular English on a 9 key keyboard and you only have to hit each key once. It's a rather weird feeling, but it works.

Actually 'intelligent layers' are good enough that Trendy teens in Japan can actually type kanji on telephone keypads!

Chinese as english complexity

[autopr0n]

If there was an award for talking out of you're ass, you'd probably stand a good chance of winning. As an American studying Chinese, I can say almost certainly that Chinese is a far, far simpler language then English.

Chinese, as far as I know (and I have had a couple of Chinese collegues), Chinese does not posses any of the advantages: it has a very large character set, a difficult prononciation with variations in how you pronounce a word and no easy to cathegorise grammar.

Wrong, wrong wrong. I don't know exactly what you mean by 'easy to categories grammar' but Chinese grammar itself is much, much simpler then English grammar. There are regional differences in pronunciation of Chinese, just as there are regional differences in the way English is spoke. There are no changes due to grammar however. Every word has the same sound regardless of it's grammatical frame (unlike English with "drive, drove, driving driven," and worse "is, be, being, was"). Also, when using the Pin-Yin system of Romanization pronunciation is not difficult at all. Certainly not any more difficult that that of a Chinese person or any one else for that matter trying to speak English.

Finally, Chinese characters are for the most part made from smaller characters and easily recognizable/memorable subcomponents. Writing and remembering characters is like spelling on a grid rather then on a straight line. Writing and memorizing them isn't difficult at all once you get the hang of it.

Of course, getting them into computers has been a problem in the past, but, modern technology has allowed their use pretty much without problems.

Re:What about programming languages?

[wangi]

It makes absolutely no difference at all to the vast majority (say 99% at least) what their software is coded in, or what markup language looks like.

They're interested in content for some strange reason...

Are you really trying to say that if HTML is English-based then ALL Chinese have to have minimal English experience? I don't thik so...

Re:Chinese grammar

[Daengbo]

You are confused. "Chinese has no word order." -- my platoon sergeant at language school (and speaks it much better than I do). Anyway, from my language studies in Beijing, I will say that it follows the SVO model most of the time, similar to English.