On Sat, 3 May 2008, ss wrote:
On Saturday 03 May 2008 6:08:55 am ss wrote:
This is not just a problem of the Chinese language,
Replying to my own post.
As a long term strategy, India really should be investing a lot more in the
study of Chinese and some other languages - especially Spanish (which should
easy)
I believe that in 50 to 100 years time, English as a dominant language - the
language of power and money will have passed its prime. India's current
advantages are purely the accidental result of having the right language at
the right time.
If I had kids today, I'd try to get them enrolled in the Chinese immersion
schools here in San Francisco, or perhaps hire a Chinese tutor. How cool
would it have been, as a kid, to know a language your parents don't know,
but your friends do? That would have been awesome. The idea of kids
talking chinese to each other to avoid their parents snooping/overhearing...
Anyway, I feel like it will be a more valuable second language than
Spanish, which is what they encourage the most in California schools; even
then, picking up Spanish later in life is going to be easier than picking
up Chinese. Either that or Arabic....
Language tutoring is yet one more thing that can be done transnationally,
check out:
http://www.interlangua.com/
Even today there is no widespread effort to translate major scientific
work into Indian languages, and there is no need, because everything is
available in English which is fine. Some time down the line "major
scientific works" are likely to come increasingly in other languages -
and I am betting on Chinese as being one of them.
It's possible. We are already seeing examples of Chinese firms filing
patents, in Chinese, and then suing foreign firms for voilating those
patents:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-09/29/content_6814576.htm
The Chinese patent office claims to run a "machine translation" service
for abstracts of Chinese patents, but so far all I could find in that
database were foreign-firm patents filed in China.
Brian
