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Comment by darthoctopus | Hacker News Reader

the assertion being made here is not that Mandarin will become a dominant text-based language; it already is one. rather, the argument is that the ascendancy of China, abetted by its economic strategy in the developing world, will force Mandarin into a more central position on the Internet, like it or not.

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>will force Mandarin into a more central position on the Internet, like it or not.

Not really, compare it to Spanish. China will also have to understand that the World is bigger then China, the rest of the World accepted English as THE technical language of "choice". Chinese have to learn English, like it or not.

The difference between Spanish and Mandarin is that Mandarin is much more information dense. In fact, it's the only widely spoken language more information dense than English.

Aside from that, english is just such a meh language. Asian kids get higher math scores in part because mandarin's numbering system actually makes sense ('eleven, twelve, thirteen' don't include the words one, two, or three, while the numerical representations include 1, 2, 3). You can consistently memorize a phone number in mandarin, but you can't in english because the syllables are too long. Thinking about money in mandarin biases people towards long term saving, while thinking about money in English biases people towards short term spending.

Basically, it's like a less drastic version of the movie 'Arrival'. I think not long after the idea that language can actively be designed to our benefit becomes more popular, we might be speaking an entirely language altogether. Language design is unlike city design or technology design in that there are no technological or budgetary constraints, no 'real world' tradeoffs to make. You can theoretically invent the perfect language tomorrow and it wouldn't cost you anything except time. One of the only things that can improve humans for basically free.

> Aside from that, english is just such a meh language. Asian kids get higher math scores in part because mandarin's numbering system actually makes sense ('eleven, twelve, thirteen' don't include the words one, two, or three, while the numerical representations include 1, 2, 3).

This doesn't represent a fact of any sort of linguistic truth whatsoever.

These are research findings, not my own ideas: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for-math-1410...

This idea has been floating around for decades (wouldn't surprise me some researchers decided to test it), but its exact claims are only around ease of counting and arithmetic (the very basic levels), not mathematics as a whole.

Ease of counting numerals doesn't necessarily translate to overall mathematical ability. French and Russian have fairly complicated numerals, but many of the world's best mathematicians also happen to be French and Russian speaking... and of course, English speaking.

At the higher levels of mathematics, abstract thinking becomes more important than arithmetic. It's not obvious to me that facility at arithmetic is necessarily advantageous then. In fact, I wonder if highly inflected languages (Latin-derived) or those with complex grammars (Hungarian, Slavic) train the brain to work with symbols more efficiently.

You may be right about the abstract thinking, but if we're talking strictly in terms of PISA test scores, Russia and France performed only slightly above average in a fairly recent year. However, I acknowledge that measuring mathematical proficiency with test scores alone is flawed.

>Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish use simpler number words and express math concepts more clearly than English

Than English...that article is complete bullshit, the Inuits have 30 different words for snow = more information density, but is it usable for every culture?

Can you elaborate on how having 30 words for snow affects a language's information density?

English needs maybe 4-5 five words to describe a particular snow condition (hard crust but underneath soft and wet), Inuits have one single word for that exact snow-condition therefore a higher information density (for that situation)

This is not the information density we are referring to.

Just did a Google. From my napkin calculations, spanish has 66% the information density that mandarin has.

>information density

That has absolutely nothing to do with usability.

>You can consistently memorize a phone number in mandarin, but you can't in english because the syllables are too long

I'm not sure what this means. I do memorize phone numbers in english, albeit not very much these days due to the phone address book. But this made me contemplate whether I am memorizing the words or the numbers. When I repeat my phone number to myself, I "hear" the english words, but I "see" the numbers.

This is also from a study. The gist is that english single-digit numbers take longer to say/think than mandarin single-digit numbers (1/3 second vs 1/4 second), and so 9 digits in english be slightly too long to be consistently memorizable for most people.

There are more authoritative sources but this is what I found: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/07/01/137527742/c...

Also, when I say them aloud or in my head, mandarin numbers are clearly shorter.

Upon further research, it seems like Vietnamese is also very information dense.

>1/3 second vs 1/4 second

I have an instant reaction doubting that statement. Not because the numbers are obviously wrong in themselves or I think you made them up or the source was lying.

It implies a precision such that 1/3 s != 1/4 s. The difference is 80 ms.

To be a meaningful statement, it implies that the speed measured can be characterized to some fraction of 80 ms, and that the variance within english and mandarin speakers is also significantly smaller. I cannot conceive of that being the case.

As a speaker of both languages, when I say the numbers aloud or in my mind the difference is obvious.

>The gist is that English single-digit numbers take longer to say/think than mandarin

That has nothing to say, compare it to programming languages, is the language with the least LOC's the best language? No, often its a mix.

You're thinking about it from purely a programmer's perspective. Imagine the world switches to "bobish" tomorrow, which is 20% more efficient than english.

Suddenly, bandwidth decreases by 20%, downloads are 20% faster, server costs decrease 20%, data centre energy usage decreases by 20%, greenhouse gases from data centres decrease by 20%, and so global warming slows down by _% and on and on. Sure it won't be 20%, it might not be nearly that in many cases, but think about the magnitude of the rube goldberg of unknown efficiency increases you'll set off.

>You're thinking about it from purely a programmer's perspective

>Suddenly, bandwidth decreases by 20%, downloads are 20% faster

Who is thinking from a programmer perspective now? Compression is not always a good thing, and for sure not in natural language.

Why is compression bad in natural language? From reading those vitamin water labels it's clear to me that English still has room to shrink before we experience a substantial hit to readability. 'You' to 'u', 'what' to 'wat', 'phone' to 'fone', etc.

> Thinking about money in mandarin biases people towards long term saving, while thinking about money in English biases people towards short term spending.

This sounds like absolute baloney. What is your basis for claiming this?

A study I read, I'd dig it up but I've done that twice already, perhaps you can do a quick google?

Here's a starting point: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=222702...

One of the most important factors making languages like English or Spanish central to the internet is that they are spoken widely across the globe by people of diverse nations and cultures.

What are the odds of that happening with Mandarin?

Sure, it might be “central“ to understanding the discourse of almost a quarter of the world’s population, but then the same argument could be made for Hindi.

Also, let’s not forget that Chinese discourse is not free, and that will negatively affect the centrality of all of its languages.

This is because China has historically been much less colonialist than some other nations.

> rather, the argument is that the ascendancy of China, abetted by its economic strategy in the developing world, will force Mandarin into a more central position on the Internet, like it or not.

I can't see how China can ascend much further. They are hedged in by powerful nations who see China's military ambitions as their own loss. They have no allies of note and are bordered by several unstable regions (some of whom possess nuclear weapons).

Economically, they have already converted the bulk of their regional citizens to urban workers. Their growth is largely bound to the debt expansion they promote and, while they are hardly alone in this, they are centralising and making their economy more rigid rather than making it flexible enough to cope with the inevitable restructure.

Politicians and public servants appear (from my perspective) to make decisions based on who these will make happy and who they will upset.

The Chinese culture does not appear to be making any headway into selling itself to the world. Few people want to immigrate to China and become Chinese (outside of academic interest of course), but the West remains a destination for people who want to take a chance on making a fortune.

Lastly China has walled off its internet. While they are happy for brigading to occur on certain topics, they must balance this need with the possibility that someone might compare Xi to a certain pooh bear or be reminded of Tienanmen Square for all the wrong reasons.

There are paths China might take to global ascendancy. There are no signs that they are willing, much less capable, of walking them.

That's what people said about Japanese back in the '80s; you practically couldn't open a newspaper without seeing somebody mention it. Didn't happen.

The difference this time around is that Chinese has almost double the information density of Japanese, and the Chinese middle class is a lot bigger ($$$).

Aren't we long past the text information density mattering? Text is negligible in comparison to even still images.

From my quite limited understanding, english is involved at some level during image and video encoding.

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