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Let's not confuse the issue here. It's Yahoo aiding the Chinese government that's the issue here, not communism.

 

Calling China "communist" is oversimplifying. The government is a dictatorship more than anything else, and they have a large component of capitalism in their economy.

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Yahoo attorney Michael Callahan discussed what the company might have faced if it had refused to provide the information to the Chinese government.

 

"I cannot ask our local employees to resist lawful demands and put their own freedom at risk, even if, in my personal view, the local laws are overboard," Callahan said.

 

Can't fault Yahoo completely when the blogger should have had the common sense to realize the backlash posting pro-democratic blogs would entail. Putting them on the spot like that, expecting them to uphold the human rights of their own country in a foreign place, disregarding the rules of those they do business with, it's the equivalent of disciplining a neighbors hellraising children. Sure the kids need a dose of it, but don't expect your ass to not get bitten since it's not your place to judge.

Loose BOWELS are the first sign of THE CHOLERA MORBUS!
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Personally I think the Chinese government should be removed and new, less corrupt officials elected. Of course, the government is not the only problem.

 

Yeah. I always thought that Bush should also liberate China and implement a god abiding, truhfull goverment. I think he would be the best person to do this.

Gerhard

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Hypothetically even if we were to invade china (U.S.) at this point we'd get our ass kicked. Not only that but there are simply too many people, too many innocent lives at stake. It'd be genocide.

 

Really i'm just pissed off about all the imported crap in the U.S. From producers to consumers. It's so stupid. Plus sending labor overseas just creating less jobs.

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China is slowly moving towards capitalism and democracy of its own accord. At the moment they're going through the industrial revolution x1000 and it's going to take a while for the rust to settle. When this happens they'll be the superpower - atheist, populous, rich, republican, and Mandarin will be spoken all over the world just as English is today. Military intervention at this point would be pointless, would destroy the world economy, and 'we' would lose.

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Mandarin will not be spoken all over the world, even when China becomes the superpower, unless they belatedly decide to embark upon creating a global empire.

The reason English is spoken all over the world is not due to the US becoming the superpower in the early 20th century, but due to Britain's former massive colonial and empire building days.

Well, with any war these days which could turn nuclear, then everyone ends up the loser, so that's not going to happen, and I don't see any reason for it.

China is no worse a place than Britain or the US was at the same stage in their development.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

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I'm pretty sure that Mandarin would never replace English as the "international" language, because it is not a suitably efficient or expressive language for the purpose. My father is trying to learn Mandarin and it is extremely difficult for a non-native speaker to learn, due to its limited grammar, massive number of characters (but limited number of sounds to express those characters), multiple unrelated meanings for each word with huge amounts of information dependent on context, etc.

 

Trying to conduct a legal or business transaction in Mandarin must be an absolute nightmare. Apparently even native speakers sometimes have to simulate writing a character on their hand in order to communicate which of the many symbols associated with a particular sound they mean.

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Personally I think the Chinese government should be removed and new, less corrupt officials elected. Of course, the government is not the only problem.

 

Replace "Chinese" with the the country of your choice.

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Yeah. I always thought that Bush should also liberate China and implement a god abiding, truhfull goverment. I think he would be the best person to do this.

"We are not going to invade China! The very idea is prepos--prepostar--it's bad. China is our ally! Some of you journalists seem to have gotten it in your heads that he's one of the good guys--I mean, one of the bad guys, and that's just not true. I have looked into Who Juntao's heart, and he's a good soul. I trust him. I trust him implicitly."

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OrbWeaver, I don't think English is that much better, it just seems so to us because it's our language. How words sound has so little relation to their spelling that they might as well be characters, it's a mad mix of every language on earth, and had another language's grammar festooned upon it. It must be a bit of a nightmare to learn from scratch.

 

I'm a bit distrustful of 'apparently even native speakers sometimes have to simulate writing a character on their hand'. I've heard enough such 'apparently' and 'a friend said' heard about other languages that turn out to be nonsense. And if it's 'an absolute nightmare' to do business in Chinese, it doesn't seem to have stopped their massive boom of growth over the last few years.

 

I agree with oDDity that english is spoken all over the world in part because of the British empire. But the more recent growth is certainly thanks to the globalisation of American culture. And once the same thing happens with Chinese I think we'll see a similar result.

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OrbWeaver, I don't think English is that much better, it just seems so to us because it's our language. How words sound has so little relation to their spelling that they might as well be characters, it's a mad mix of every language on earth, and had another language's grammar festooned upon it. It must be a bit of a nightmare to learn from scratch.

 

There is an element of that, but I have heard from many different sources that English is a language of very high expressive power compared to other languages (Ancient Greek is pretty good as well). Just look at the translations in multi-lingual instruction manuals to observe than in general (although by no means always) the English is much more succinct.

 

I'm a bit distrustful of 'apparently even native speakers sometimes have to simulate writing a character on their hand'. I've heard enough such 'apparently' and 'a friend said' heard about other languages that turn out to be nonsense. And if it's 'an absolute nightmare' to do business in Chinese, it doesn't seem to have stopped their massive boom of growth over the last few years.

 

I believe my father was reporting his Mandarin teacher, who admittedly I have never met and may have been talking out of his/her crack, but I doubt it. I am also not suggesting that Chinese people cannot do business in Chinese, but the idea that it will replace English as the international language of business when it is (1) incredibly difficult for Westerners to learn and (2) possibly limited in precision and clarity seems rather unlikely to me.

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There's a tendency for English speakers to believe our own hype regarding the language and asume it is the best just because it's one of the most widely used, and I can see how it could get on the tits of people who speak other languages. English isn't an easy language by any means, and it is just as confusing for a Chinese person to get his head around English as it is for an English speaker to get his head around Chinese. I wouldn't say any one is better than the other. A Chinese speaker would surely argue that their pictoral alphabet is a quicker way of writing a word rather than having to arrange a bunch of individual letters in a particular order. I don't see how having to learn a few thousand of these pictures, which seem to follow a particular pattern, is any different from the millions of combinations of letters which we have to master to communicate through the medium of written English. I've heard it argued that children in Japan can't understand all their symbols until they're in their teens. But try to find a child who can understand the majority of day to day english words. A lot of words mean several differnt things, and a few have more than one meaning that contradict each other. This doesn't usually occur to a person who's spoken the language all their life, and I'm sure Chinese speakers don't stop to curse the apparent flaws in their language, but just accept it and talk around them.

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I'm a bit distrustful of 'apparently even native speakers sometimes have to simulate writing a character on their hand'. I've heard enough such 'apparently' and 'a friend said' heard about other languages that turn out to be nonsense. And if it's 'an absolute nightmare' to do business in Chinese, it doesn't seem to have stopped their massive boom of growth over the last few years.

I'm not an expert or anything, just took a class, but I would guess this applies more to people from different dialects trying to communicate. The problem is that China is so huge, regional dialects there are as different as French and German are here. If everyone speaks Mandarin it's okay.

 

Still, there is a huge amount of polymorphism. Granted there are a lot of common "words" that are really made up of two or more single-syllable words, but for single words, there are only so many single-syllable sounds you can make, and only 5 tones to differentiate them. So you have a lot of words with the same sound, same tone, different character, spoken sounds exactly the same, but meaning is totally different.

 

Everything is figured out by context, but if there's not enough context, you end up saying things like "xianzai de zai ba?" meaning: "is this 'zai' you're saying the same 'zai' that is in the common two-word phrase 'xianzai', or is it some other 'zai'?" Apparently fluent people actually do this, not just people learning the language. I don't know how common it is though. The case I heard was when you're introduced to someone (Mr. Zai) and want to write down their surname, but you don't know what to write down, because there might be a few common surnames with the same sound that use different characters, so people use it in another phrase to pin down which character it is exactly.

 

Then, even the same word, same tone, same character can have a few different meanings. The more you know already, the easier it is to put things in context. But if you're just learning, and you read a sentence where you don't know 5 of the 7 words in it, you're pretty much fucked. You can look up each in a dictionary, but it will give you several meanings for each, making it take a long time to work out what the whole sentence could actually mean.

 

The better dictionaries also give you the common two or three word phrases used by that character though, so if you look through that list and see the character after or before it in the sentence, then you can actually get the right meaning.

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The case I heard was when you're introduced to someone (Mr. Zai) and want to write down their surname, but you don't know what to write down, because there might be a few common surnames with the same sound that use different characters, so people use it in another phrase to pin down which character it is exactly.

Again, I fail to see how this is any different using our alphabet. As a journalist I have endless conversations along the lines of 'is that Tomas or Thomas, or Tomos?', 'Stephen or Steven?', 'Dylan or Dillon?' (these are just examples within my own family!) - a whole host of surnames are pronounced the same but spelt differently.

 

As for everything depending on context, well that's language for you. Words like rent, awesome, comprise, original, dust, against, cool, dense, fast, to name a few from thousands, have different meanings depending on the context in which they're spoken.

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It's a difference of degree. English has some words which are spelt and sound the same but mean different things in different contexts (and in many cases the meanings are logically related anyway), but is not the case that almost every word has four or five completely unrelated meanings that have to be inferred from context.

 

The tone-dependence is another gotcha from a Western perspective as well; the native speakers are of course used to it, but imagine trying to teach the English-speaking world a language where you can mortally offend somebody by using the wrong intonation to pronounce a word.

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The tone aren't that hard to pick up, with a good teacher. I really didn't do well with the reading and writing though.

 

@Macsen: I know context is everything, but when I read an english sentence, I could conceivably look up every word in a dictionary and get the meaning of the sentence. With Mandarin, many more words than English have many different meanings, and many words are used in some two or more word combo that has some understood meaning not immediately apparent from the individual words (like "house warming" in english. No, it's not a party where they turn the heat up really high).

 

Not to mention that it takes me forever just to look up a single character. You have to identify what radical the character has, and sometimes the same radical can be written a few different ways, and can be creatively placed within a character. Once you identify that, you have to guess how many strokes the rest of the character took to write, so you have to basically draw it from scratch in your mind, and count the strokes. That gets you into a huge list of characters with that radical and that number of strokes, and you just check them one by one until you find a match to your mystery character. Sometimes you guess the number of strokes wrong, and find that your mystery character is not there after checking the whole list. Then finally, if you do find the character, you get 5 different meanings and frustration sets in.

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imagine trying to teach the English-speaking world a language where you can mortally offend somebody by using the wrong intonation to pronounce a word.

A tall order indeed, given that the 'English-speaking world' has not only been recalcitrant when it comes to learning any other language but also generally demand that countries and people who don't speak English do so. If and when the table turns and they find themselves forced to learn another global language to get by, I shan't feel much sympathy for those who complain that it's too difficult. They should also have a foreign culture imposed upon them, for good measure. :P

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Ah yes, I always forget that you'd prefer it if everybody spoke Welsh instead.

 

That really would be a nightmare for the world of business, somebody might have a coughing fit during an important phone call and subsequently find that they'd inadvertently liquidated the company.

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That really would be a nightmare for the world of business, somebody might have a coughing fit during an important phone call and subsequently find that they'd inadvertently liquidated the company.

How witty of you, no one's ever done such a joke before. :wub:

 

Doesn't it sort of prove my point though? English speakers have a deep seated paranoia about other languages and feel the need to belittle them. They also have a tendency to make up stories about invented weaknesses in other languages - the whole 'spitting Welsh' myth is a good case in point, or 'Welsh has no vowels', or 'my freind walked into a bar and they all started speaking Welsh'. It makes your previous claims about the Chinese language highly dubious. I know the stories about Welsh are rubbish, why should I believe these stories about the Chinese language?

 

But for the record, yes I do prefer the Welsh language. It's completely phonetic, no word has multiple meanings, and its system of mutation for ensuring smooth flow from one word to another is one no language should be without. At the same time it's poetic, full-bodied and full of delighful idioms. It's pretty much the perfect language, really.

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English speakers have a deep seated paranoia about other languages and feel the need to belittle them.

 

There's some paranoia going on here, certainly, but I'm pretty sure it's not coming from me.

 

It makes your previous claims about the Chinese language highly dubious. I know the stories about Welsh are rubbish, why should I believe these stories about the Chinese language?

 

My "claims" about the Mandarin language come from my father who is (or was) studying it under the instruction of a professional tutor and native Mandarin speaker, and have largely been corroborated by Ishtvan who has apparently studied it himself to some extent. You are, nonetheless, most welcome to believe that I have fabricated it all out of whole cloth in order to shit on non-English cultures if it makes you feel any better. :rolleyes:

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My "claims" about the Mandarin language come from my father who is (or was) studying it under the instruction of a professional tutor and native Mandarin speaker...

 

Erm...

 

I believe my father was reporting his Mandarin teacher, who admittedly I have never met and may have been talking out of his/her crack...

 

:ph34r:

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