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Comment by jomamaxx | Hacker News Reader

"That doesn't preclude Chinese from being the same, or becoming the same."

+ It won't. The international language already English and that won't change (India, North America, Europe - most of Africa, the Middle East are already English as international lang. even China esp. Hong Kong, Singapore) - but Chinese may become a 'sphere of influence' language in surrounding countries - much like Spanish or French. Of course it kind of that already.

+ The issue of not releasing documentation in English is odd, given that English docs would enable them to access maybe a 5x greater market. And for the cost of what? Clearly, it's a strategic decision on their part - there's some kind of impetus behind it. Possibly they don't think it's ready. Who knows? But it's not likely an oversight. It was a decision.

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You forgot to mention the reason why it won't. The Chinese writing system is too complicated to gain widespread popularity among foreign second language users. It takes years of learning to just get to the level of being able to read a simple newspaper.

Note that this has nothing to do with the various spoken languages in China, most importantly Mandarin, which are relatively easy to learn for foreigners.

This is probably the single biggest hamstring of Chinese culture, historically. It's amazing the levels of literacy that were achieved at times during the pre-modern period, given how complex the writing system is. Imagine what could have been with an alphabetic/syllabic system - you can teach a six-year-old how to read 95%[1] of English words in one year of schooling, since they only need to learn 26 letters and perhaps 100 common groupings of them, most of which do follow similar patterns.

[1] Statistics drawn from that orifice where all off-the-cuff statistics are drawn, but you get the general idea

> (India, North America, Europe - most of Africa, the Middle East are already English as international lang.

Most of that number only learn English as a second language. Second languages are much more amenable to change than native ones.

"Most of that number only learn English as a second language."

In most of these areas, English is not a 'second language', it's a 'second administrative language' with a de-facto official status.

Languages have incredible incumbency, now that English is fairly entrenched in most places, it's not going away.

Unless you think that China will start producing entertainment (TV, films, music), products, services - available only in Chinese - that the rest of the world 'really needs' - it's not going to happen. If China makes anything work well internationally, it's going to have to be in a local language or in English.

Even today - as China is a fairly large economy - there are very, very few people learning to speak Chinese as a second language. Though it is much more common than before - it's still rare.

Here's a hint: in the UK - even though they do most of their business with the continent - almost none of them speak another language. Why? Because there is very low utility - everyone else speaks English. So it's pointless for Brits to speak French, German, Swedish etc..

> + It won't.

I believe that's what they said about Latin at some point!

The long tail of available English content that is available on the internet will ensure that it remains dominant. Latin never had the sheer quantity of content that English has.

And Greek did not have the sheer content Latin had. Still Latin was replaced.

"I believe that's what they said about Latin at some point!"

When Latin was dominant, there was maybe 5% literacy.

Now, globally we have 90%+ literacy in most nations.

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