
China bans English words in media - J3L2404
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12050067
======
joshklein
The French also disallow "franglais" - a mix of French and English - in media,
in order to avoid polluting their language.

This seems like a par for the course from a nation that looked until the 1500s
like it would be the dominant world power before it turned inward.

~~~
mlgrinshpun
The Académie Française sometimes pushes for the replacement of anglicisms with
French neologisms, as was the case with the replacement of "e-mail" or "mail"
by "courriel" a few years ago. Sometimes, the government follows suit and
mandates that official communications adopt the change.

I suppose that this could be interpreted as 'disallowing "franglais"', but
your post is somewhat misleading. The media – newspapers, television, etc. –
can say whatever the hell they want to, in whatever language they want to, and
remain quite full of anglicisms, including "e-mail."

~~~
zupatol
The french did pass a law about using french in official government
publications, in all advertisements, in all workplaces, in commercial
contracts, in some other commercial communication contexts, in all government-
financed schools, and some other contexts:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law>

The french wikipedia page mentions that this law was later substantially
watered down by the constitutional council.

------
KirinDave
It seems to me like this has less to do with linguistic heritage and more to
do with controlling people's ability to consume media from an English-tilted
Internet.

Since most people never get far in foreign language classes, media exposure is
a major factor in foreign language literacy.

~~~
raquo
Or it may be done so that people don't get to know how certain events or
phenomena are named in English and therefore search for them in Chinese rather
than in English, and get much more loyal-to-China results on average.

~~~
hugh3
Perhaps, but one doesn't need nefarious theories (without doubting the
nefariety of the Chinese Government) to explain linguistic chauvinism.

~~~
willchang
There are two other possible explanations.

(1) Languages that borrow don't just borrow when they "need" to. For example,
most languages have perfectly good ways to communicate "okay", but may borrow
it nonetheless. But over time the borrowing may displace the native words or
limit their applicability. The Chinese may be anxious that sinitic words will
shrink in semantic scope once widespread borrowing takes over. This is not a
disaster from a linguistic point of view, of course; it is just language
change. But those that deem foreign borrowings illegitimate out of a sense of
nationalism will be left with a sense of a shrinking language. Perhaps this is
an element in the chauvinism you mentioned.

(2) In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes
a language harder to learn, cf. English. I don't know if the Chinese
government deserves credit for realizing this, though.

~~~
tokenadult
_In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes a
language harder to learn, cf. English._

That's an empirical claim. Is there any evidence to back that up? In
particular, is there any standardized way to characterize which languages have
more diverse etymologies and which have less? Is there a standardized way to
compare the difficulty of learning languages as a second language in the
abstract (as contrasted with the difficulty of learning some particular
language given a particular first-language background)?

I get the distinct impression, from my acquaintance with people from all over
the world, that many second-language learners think learning English is rather
easy, not least because there are so very many opportunities to be exposed to
English and to practice English all over the world.

~~~
Retric
Yes, Yes, and Yes. Languages and the relationships between them has received a
lot of attention / study. Grated not all linguistic family's have received the
same attention but there are thousands of reasonably distinct languages most
of which have been reasonably well documented.

PS: Learning the language is not just about learning _ as a second language,
primary schools spend a lot of time teaching the proper way to communicate.
And English requires far more instruction time than some other closely related
languages like Spanish.

------
patio11
Japan has a storied relationship with this question. My say-very-quietly-
around-nationalists opinion is that the alphabet has become the fourth major
writing system used in modern Japanese, via popular acclamation.

~~~
maxawaytoolong
OK!

------
corin_
Not exactly relevant to the story, but this reminded me of something Aaron
Sorkin wrote into the first series of The West Wing which has stuck with me
since, and which I think is worthy of repeating even if the Chinese are
banning English, rather than trying to make English the official language.

    
    
      It's ludicrous to think that laws need to be created to help protect the language of Shakespeare.

~~~
foljs
> It's ludicrous to think that laws need to be created to help protect the
> language of Shakespeare.

While a nice line, it is wrong. Everything needs protection.

Especially great things, like the "language of Shakespeare".

Now, this protection need not necessarily be in the form of law, but it sure
needs to be in the form of effort.

~~~
sid0
_Everything needs protection._

Do you have a logical or empirical basis for this statement, or is this an
axiom for you?

~~~
foljs
> Do you have a logical or empirical basis for this statement, or is this an
> axiom for you?

Ignoring the passive-aggressiveness, yes, I have an empirical basis for this
statement.

Don't you?

Ever heard of the "broken window" theory? Ever heard of entropy? Ever read the
_history_ of any cultural aspect, from poetry to jazz, to teaching, to coding?

Everything needs protection --people putting in the effort, care, education,
craftsmanship and hard work to keep it alive, to improve it and to resist the
tendency to decay and dillution.

~~~
sid0
_Ever heard of the "broken window" theory? Ever heard of entropy? Ever read
the history of any cultural aspect, from poetry to jazz, to teaching,_

Yes, _some_ things, those that are vulnerable, need protection. The Bengal
tiger needs protection. The tribal languages in the Amazon need protection.
English is in no way vulnerable, so it really doesn't need any protection.

On the other hand, maybe _you_ need to read the history of how English evolved
into what it is today. It certainly isn't because of prescriptivist nonsense
like "protect[ing]" the language from "decay and dilution".

 _to coding?_

Funny you mention that -- one programming language that's been "protect[ed]"
from "decay and dilution" a lot is Java, and look what a boring, unimaginative
cesspool that's become.

~~~
foljs
> Funny you mention that -- one programming language that's been "protect[ed]"
> from "decay and dilution" a lot is Java, and look what a boring,
> unimaginative cesspool that's become.

Huh? Java "protected from decay and dilution"?

Witch the exception of SUN never liking native interface linking, Java was
ANYTHING BUT protected from decay. Java went about adding and adopting stuff,
from Swing to generics to annotations to functional stuff, to remoting, to
various EE fads of the day, without ever thinking about whats best about the
core language and how to keep it clean and agile.

I would have liked it if in place of Java we had a purer language, like, say,
Smalltalk.

~~~
sid0
_Huh? Java "protected from decay and dilution"?_

Compare Java to C#. C# was originally a Java clone, but the designers
liberally borrowed from everywhere, worrying about actual use cases and not
purity of any sort. Today C# is at the boundary between mainstream and
academic programming. (It has _monads_ for God's sake. They don't call it
monads, of course. They call it LINQ.)

Java? It added generics after C# did, and only now is it finally going to add
proper closures.

------
tibbon
Can some words even be expressed in 'pure Chinese'? I see in foreign
(primarily spanish-speaking) papers all the time that they have loan-words or
just straight up use many of the technical words that English developed.

"Internet" "World Wide Web" "iPhone" "HDMI cable" "Digital SLR"

Are all pretty much exactly the same in Spanish as English. To remove the
'English' there... well you need to make up totally new words then. Seems a
difficult problem.

Note: I'm not even great at English some days, and know little about Chinese.

~~~
bitwize
I shared a dorm with a lot of native Spanish speakers and were surprised to
hear them use the English word _weapon_ to refer to the weapons in first-
person shooter games. For example to describe the railgun in _Quake_ : "este
weapon es muy lento".

~~~
huherto
Native spanish speaker here. If you are used to see the word in Englsh, you
may even forget what is the word in Spanish. Also, people from Spain are more
careful about preserving the language, people from other spanish speaking
countries not so much. Spanish speakers living in the US, use Spanglish all
the time.

------
yock
The link is to the BBC, but this story is in the US newspapers today as well.
The irony there is that plenty of Americans seem to want exactly this, and
perhaps more, from their government as well. Yet it's portrayed as a negative
in the English-speaking press.

~~~
dantheman
I don't think so, English incorporates words from other languages all the
time. I think there are Americans that are against things being written in
foreign languages, but not against incorporating foreign words as part of the
English vocabulary.

~~~
tokenadult
Indeed, the linguist Ronald Wardhaugh shows in his historical studies that one
of the reasons English has won out over French as a world language is that
English makes no attempt to be "pure" but rather adapts to how speakers use
it, making it more user-friendly as a second language for speakers around the
world.

------
ximeng
Problem is that it can be fashionable in Chinese to use English to show you
are educated. I imagine they want to avoid this kind of thing happening in the
mainland:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cantonesebillboard.jpg>

Here is the original announcement in Chinese:

<http://www.gapp.gov.cn/cms/html/21/508/201012/708310.html>

and a rough Google translated version:

[http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...](http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=zh-
CN&tl=en&u=http://www.gapp.gov.cn/cms/html/21/508/201012/708310.html&act=url)

~~~
Natsu
Personally, I liked the sign that got translated as "Translation Server Error"

But there's a ton of misuse on both sides. God help you if you believe that
there's a "Chinese alphabet" that things like initials can be translated into
(<http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/> has a long list of tattoo victims of that
gibberish "Asian font"), but there's plenty of the reverse, too. I still
haven't tried "Pocari Sweat" (a common sports drink that doesn't sound very
appetizing; there should be pictures of it on engrish.com among other places).

------
camrober
The French tried to do this with the French language but failed. The most
obvious success story is the Japanese language's katakana syllabury that
allows English words to be written and/or abbreviated in japanese. For the
Japanese, 99.9% of post-war technical words are written in Japanese katakana
but then the Japanese have always had a history of successfully adopting and
adapting.

------
jsmcgd
This seems like a great mechanism for the populous to protest against the
government. Casually and habitually using forbidden words will demonstrate and
communicate their dissatisfaction and because it isn't a serious crime it can
flourish and overtime erode authority and popular support. An own goal.

------
shard
Unless they go all the way back and scrub out PinYin as well, English is
always going to be engrained in China.

~~~
tokenadult
What does the Hanyu pinyin spelling system for Modern Standard Chinese have to
do with English?

------
eegilbert
This is why India will win in the long-term.

~~~
hcho
Loanword do not really help in learning a language. They can even be
detrimental.

~~~
shard
How might they be detrimental? My Korean acquisition is being greatly sped up
by it's large number of English and Chinese loan words. Korean grammar is
notoriously difficult already even with the loan words. Having 50% of all the
new vocabulary be somewhat recognizable makes not only memorization easier, it
makes it possible to sometimes understand words I haven't encountered before.
It's definitely been a great aid in getting fluent in Korean.

~~~
hcho
English loanwords in another language might help an English speaking person,
no doubt. I was more thinking a Chinese person trying to learn English.

Loanwords tend to pe pronounced quite differently in the host language, which
detoriates the accent.

------
anonymous246
Obligatory:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langua...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language)

Full text: <http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit>

"It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the
slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

One of the most insightful sentences I've ever read. IMHO, non-European
languages only have rough equivalents for Renaissance concepts like equality,
democracy, scientific inquiry etc (yeah yeah, I know Greece had a so-called
democracy; I'm talking about our modern-day understanding of these concepts).
Blocking the precise word from being used in Chinese may be a mind-control
trick.

~~~
hugh3
I'm confused about your parenthetical Greek remark. Isn't ancient Greek a
European language, and doesn't our actual word "democracy" come directly from
it?

And I'm not so sure that their concept of the meaning of "democracy" was
significantly different to ours, even though there were significant
differences for how it went on in practice.

~~~
anonymous246
What I meant is that in Greece only a few people voted (IIRC women and slaves
weren't allowed to vote), so it wasn't close to our current understanding of
democracy. Unless I'm mistaken and Greece had universal adult franchise.

And hence supporting my claim that "democracy" is a Renaissance concept rather
than an ancient Greek concept.

~~~
burgerbrain
In numerous countries, and some states in the US, convicted felons who have
completed their sentence are not allowed to vote. Are those not democracies as
we currently understand it?

For that matter, ALL countries that I am aware of that allow their citizens to
vote set an arbitrary 'magic number' and don't let you vote unless you are at
least that old. Are _those_ not democracies as we currently understand it?

In the United States, non-citizen residents are not allowed to vote. How is
this any different from the ancient Greeks not allowing non-citizen residents
to vote? Their democracy was not at all that different from our democracies
today, it is the definition of "full citizen" that has changed.

