the Chinese do not use QWERTY, either.

Uh, yes they do. Most people type in pinyin on QWERTY keyboards.

As an aside, I just had to correct myself after misspelling QWERTY.

in modern-day Poland, when you ride the train, there are multi-lingual signs instructing on how do do things like open the windows or operate the toilet. The signs appear in Polish (it's Poland, after all), German (much of Poland was Germany and vice versa), Russian (it was under the Soviet sphere of influence), and French (the international language). No English.

That's because they assume English speakers already know how to use a toilet.

I'll see myself out.

In large swaths of Africa, German or French is the dominant non-local language

You can't be serious. Like 85 people in Namibia speak it, that's pretty much it.

Google Translate works well with text about long-standing topics and which doesn't employ recently emerged idiom.

And it is far better with language pairs that share a lot of cultural exchange.

That's because it substantially operates without any real semantic analysis, but instead on statistical analysis of human-translated texts. They feed in books and articles which exist in both English and Spanish, for example, and the computer sees which words and phrases tend to match up.

This approach provides workable results, but it has its limits. In particular it's never going to get much better with contemporary idiom, since that's rarely used in translated materials in the required bulk. They'll have some best-selling novels here and there, but not the wide range of contexts necessary to make it really function.

Can you give us some first hand experience where you found someone in China who was not able to speak Mandarin?

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I traveled from one corner of China to the other with some colleagues from Beijing. They were native Beijing Chinese, I am a foreigner.

We had meetings in almost 100 cities and towns, and also did some sightseeing during free time.

The catchphrase of the journey was "why don't these people speak Mandarin?" I think they said it (in English) more in those few months than everything else combined. We had endless comical misunderstandings over food, meeting arrangements, transport, and everything else that didn't involve higher-ups or more educated people.

When dealing with people who could read and write, very often they'd clarify by making characters in their air with their hands or scribbling them out on a piece of paper, because that often covered the gaps better than speaking.

But sometimes that failed, and on occasion they became so frustrated that I ended up taking over by pantomiming or using my flash cards, just to break the tension and move things along.

There really isn't a language more simple that I know of.

The simplest one I know of, and one with which I'm much more familiar, is Indonesian (also Malaysian; these are essentially dialects of each other).

You can learn the basic grammar and vocabulary in a few weeks, something that would take months or years in many other languages.

And then you will not be able to understand 90% of what people are saying. Due to the lack of formal grammatical structure, native speakers have created a vast array of continually evolving tags and circumlocutions and helper mechanisms to provide missing semantic details.

I would assume it works the same way in Chinese.

Personally, I'd prefer a grammar that's baked into the language. Indonesian can be extremely poetic, and it's nice when you have the time, but it's a beast to truly follow the nuance of conversations unless you are surrounded by it all day long, and continue to keep up with changes year after year.

There's cases in English, but they are only used in some contexts, and some uses are optional and/or ambiguous (e.g. "who" vs. "whom" in embedded clauses can be ambiguous as to case agreement), thus making them substantially more difficult to deal with than languages that have regular case systems.

They're not "substantially more difficult to deal with" at all, because outside of pronouns, you can ignore them.

"Whom", like it or not, is dead in 50 years. Nobody cares and almost nobody will even notice if you fail to use it.

Spelling is more complicated by far than the grammar case system in Finnish.

This problem has almost completely been solved by technology. Context-sensitive spelling systems in everyone's electronic devices will put the issue to rest, because people aren't using pen and paper anymore.

Several of the sounds are among the rarest and most difficult to pronounce out there, and the inventory is larger than a majority of languages outside Africa.

Everyone can understand someone speaking with the typical substitutions found in, e.g., a German or Spanish accent. These things don't matter.

Uttoxeter, Billericay or Loughborough

Cherrypick much? 99,999 out of 100,000 English speakers will live their entire lives without speaking any of these names.

I come across a lot of very awkward English from very well educated people; I really do. They are not stupid - English is difficult to master.

Doesn't matter. It functions as a market language. The goal is to be understood. For those with the interest, it is possible to speak English well; a hobby for the refined, like the opera or collecting rare books. For the rest, getting one's point across is a satisfactory outcome, and one reached more easily than with Chinese, where people speaking poorly are vastly harder to comprehend due to lack of tonal fidelity.

China is already on the charm offensive in UK in a major way

And they're conducting this offensive in English. Once everyone in China learns English - and that, or something approximating it, is happening - there's little reason for people in England to turn around and learn Chinese. Perhaps it will provide an advantage for a tiny number of people in certain fields, but that's about it.

Everyone in Denmark learning English sure didn't turn into everyone in the USA learning Danish.

In any case, the Achilles' Heel of Chinese is the writing system, which you ignored in your reply. Even Chinese schools in China teaching Chinese to Chinese children start with the Latin writing system before they move on to characters. As long as there are alternatives that do not use the Chinese writing system, Chinese will never be the global lingua franca or anything like it.

Fair request. Unfortunately that's based on 30 years of reading the history of computing (as well as being there when some of it occurred), generally in sources which were never transferred to digital/online. Also working for a professor who had a NSF contract to study that question ~1983 and helping him collate surveys (again - paper!), run stats, etc. Probably read a lot of the papers he had ordered prints of as well. Would probably take a PhD research effort to put it all into citation form, even if some of that data is still available.

sPh

Excellent summary. Thanks.

sPh

Yes, the women who were finally admitted to engineering school in 1943, 44, and 45, and who were then kicked out (in some cases bodily) in 1946 without being allowed to graduate (much less take the jobs for which they had sought education) were just playing out a male-centric fantasy of evolutionary biology "explaining" pre-historic history. Got it.

sPh

- - - - - Step 1: Stigmatize the traits that lead people to excel in tech fields, men posessing those traits, and anyone in tech - - - - -

Technology people were global heroes from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Whilst arising from groups and cultures that had been stigmatized in the 60s/70s their success at opening up the new world was lionized as the PC/technology revolution got rolling. Nerd became a cool thing to be.

  Problem is that starting in the 1990s and really rolling after 2000 the tech world damaged itself in some fundamental way, and is now being looked on much more skeptically. Source of that damage isn't totally clear (well, then there's Uber) but it isn't accurate to blame society for stigmatizing technology people out of nowhere; there are reasons.

sPh

I remember reading "how to interview in Silicon Valley" articles during that time period that described firms doing things such as flying entire recruiting classes to Las Vegas and eliminating any candidates who didn't gamble and drink in large quantities. That's behavior that predictive for success in complex business-focused entities for sure.

sPH

- - - - - So before 1994, women were nearly equally represented in computing? HAHAHAHA. - - - - -

Um, much more nearly, yes.

1943 to 1945 - women were about 95% of the computing workforce.

1946 to mid/late 1950s - still a very large percentage of women, since they had the experience (from the war) and were pushed back out of other engineering fields. Computing, being a branch of applied mathematics, was considered "acceptable" for women to take up

1960-1980 - still a large percentage of women in "data processing" (as programmers and systems analysts, not just keypunch operators), esp in very large companies.

1980 - boom in university computer science begins and many women are interested. 1984 is the peak post-war year for women graduating from engineering programs (around 40% IIRC); a large percentage are CS with many of the rest EE. Many of these women (my classmates) go on to critical roles in companies and universities building out this " 'net " concept (later renamed the Internet).

post-1990 - something goes completely wacky in the industry and women are driven out of computing in large numbers; younger women don't even enter the field.

So, since you seem to be a younger dude perhaps you could explain exactly what it is that happened 1990-2000 that made the field so undesirable to women.

Supporting Excellent Iraq War II, pumping the _Bell Curve_, publishing the racist fantasies of Stephen Glass, joining the anti-public education movement, and also publishing the "No Exit" hatchet job on Bill Clinton's health care reform proposal isn't in any way shape or form liberal. And that's not even taking into account Martin Perez' racism and ethnic hatred which is of a variety that is a bit harder to criticize in US society but which most liberals reject.

Representative quote from Andrew Sullivan: "The middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column." [note that he later altered that essay as published on his blog to make it less self-damning; this is the original wording]. Yes, he's gay. No, he's not liberal.

sPh