translation question: a strange sentence

[Kenny同志]

Yes, it’s true, Roddy. Yet I doubt we can be happy with our life fifty or one hundred years later if Chinese continues to degenerate this way and at this rate.

I am still of the opinion that some changes are good, some bad. And I feel this strongly when I see so many people use longwinded and jumbled expressions unsparingly in their writing and speech.

I don’t mean to start a debate with any forum member here yet I must point out that Chinese and English are two very different languages. And when English makes significant inroads on Chinese, the effects cannot be all positive. Think about it the other way around – what if Chinese were the more powerful language? I bet most native speakers of English would be driven crazy and some linguists may would rather die if a century later English has become a language that is the same as today’s Chinglish that you see everywhere in China.

To be fair, corruption of the Chinese language is not entirely the result of Anglicisation. Propaganda language used by mouthpieces of the CCP, who controls all the media on Mainland China, has been pushing Chinese towards being more vacuous, longwinded, and redundant, and therefore, should be held responsible, too.

Besides bad Anglicisation, Chinese is threatened by several other things. Seriously, we are in a Chinese language crisis.

Edit:

但願我是杞人憂天。這兩天就中文惡性西化爭來爭去，我真的很累，不想再談論這個問題了。蘿蔔白菜，各有所愛，不可強求。雖然觀點不同，但還是可以和和氣氣地說話。我有時好為人師，大家請見諒。這個毛病真得改改了。

[skylee]

My kudos to #18 for remembering the line from 英雄本色.

我有時好為人師，大家請見諒。這個毛病真得改改了。

This sounds about right. I have already told you my views so I am not going to repeat them here.

[roddy]

I was hoping you'd notice, Skylee. I only get a chance to do that a couple of times a decade.

I have no doubt I'll find the English of 2113 odd and unattractive. Similarly the gentlefolk of 1913 will feel the same way about mine, and I find theirs somewhat archaic and stilted. Yet we all muddle happily along, appreciating the literature of our age, and with a modicum more effort, that of other ages.

[Guest realmayo]

Roddy, you seem to be referring to some kind of natural evolution that happens with language. If so, I think I agree.

But it's possible to think of influences on a language that could cause a much bigger, dramatic change.

An English poet in the 60s decided to stop using any English words that had French roots, he wanted English to be truer to its Anglo Saxon roots. The idea didn't take off. But if it had, we would have lost great chunks words & expressions, means of expressions that have developed over time and contributed to a rich and varied language. We would have been left with reduced ways to express ourselves in English. If you don't want a rich and varied language and prefer a functional one, fine, & I don't mean that in a passive-aggressive way, I accept some people might say there are more important things to worry about. But if you do want a rich and varied language, and someone starts a movement to delete a great bit part of it, you might oppose that movement, no?

That poet never had a hope of eliminating French words from English. But is it possible that Chinese is vulnerable to drastic changes? Isn't it worth deciding if the changes to Chinese that concern, say, Kenny, are simply the inevitable change and evolution of language. Or if they're part of a more drastic change?

I understand that during the cultural revolution certain art forms continued, but were re-interpreted by the Communists, such as the "model operas". I don't think that was good news for traditional Chinese art forms.

It's easy to think that all languages are the same, that change, the pace of change, and acceptance of that change, is uniform. So, we're used to English changing, the Chinese should get used to Chinese changing. But I don't think this is true. Languages are very closely linked with the society that uses them. Think of how American English will adopt slang and neologisms into the mainstream faster than British English does. The critic Christopher Ricks wrote that languages are like batteries, and come in different sizes. He said (something like) American English is like a small battery in a Walkman: it runs out really quickly, but it's super quick and easy to re-charge, very portable, anyone can do it. But French is at the other end of the scale: it's like a real heavy car battery or industrial sized battery. It lasts little-changed for ages and ages. But when it eventually needs to be re-charged it takes a whole committee of experts and officials to spend years and years working out how to do it.

So, I think it'd be wrong to dismiss out of hand people's concerns about Chinese. But I don't really have the knowledge to say if those concerns are justified, just that they could be.

[li3wei1]

Think of how American English will adopt slang and neologisms into the mainstream faster than British English does.

Do you have data or references on this, or are you just pulling it out of a hat? I'm not disagreeing, but I'd like to see how this is measured or verified. To paraphrase an old saying, slang and neologisms always seem to be adopted faster on the other side of the ocean. I think of the ease, for instance, with which the Brits adopted 'quantitative easing' for 'printing money'. Or the speed at which 'omnishambles' grew and multiplied.

It could well be true, and simply a matter of there being more speakers of American English, and therefore it changes faster (in which case, Chinese should be changing faster than we can learn it, and maybe it is). Or there could be other factors affecting the speed of change: media saturation, literacy and educational attainment, connectedness, geographical isolation. Does the fact that British television and radio is largely state-run (you can quibble with this, but it is a single large organisation with some gov't oversight), while the US has almost no state-run media, have any bearing on this? (On the other hand, the US has many state universities, and the UK doesn't have any equivalent.) Does a society with Twitter change faster than one without?

Before anyone rushes to disagree with me, please note that I'm not actually saying anything, just raising questions. Sorry if it's all off-topic.

[Guest realmayo]

Pulling it out of a hat , and it might be less true now than it was 30 years ago. The possible reasons for it that you suggest are interesting, and reinforce my sense that the way a language changes must be linked to the society that uses it, and will therefore be different in each country (which is common sense really).

As a sidenote, quantitative easing isn't printing money! People have used the term to describe Japanese central bank practices for years and years. Post-2007 I've heard it used more in a US context than in a UK one, but perhaps that's because the Fed is more important to the world than the Bank of England.

[Lu]

I don't care as deeply about Chinese as I care about my own language, but for any language I know well enough to care about, I think that change and inroads by other languages are both undesirable (for the most part at least) and inevitable. Most people don't care about language all that much and will use whatever word or sentence structure comes to mind. And a few people care and will continue to fight for better language use and appreciate more 'pure' use of language. But at the same time, every generation does this, so although I'd likely find a lot of aspects of Dutch in 2113 ugly, and Kenny will find so for Chinese, neither of us will be there to see it and the people who care about language by then will hold up Han Han et al. as the classic example to follow.

[陳德聰]

In response to #24, but also in general to the thread of discussion on language change:

I think you might be interested in reading some of these studies and articles. I am a firm believer that a) linguistic change is universal and inevitable, b) it can be viewed objectively, and c) it will always face resistance from certain types of people (though I think I saw somewhere in one of these journals that people who are linguistically conservative are not necessarily conservative in their, say, political views). I think it's all fine and dandy to talk about language change in English vs. Chinese and one language perverting another language based on power hierarchies but... it the topic has been studied to death and has a pretty large wealth of knowledge ever growing that we can employ here.

Language Change + China

Effect of Social Changes on Chinese Language Change in Translation (Wang, 2010)

This is sort of wishy-washy on the connection between social changes and language changes, but it is an interesting look at diachronic changes in Chinese translation.

Hong Kong written Chinese: Language change induced by language contact (Shi, 2006)

An article showing to what extent Cantonese + English affect the Standard Chinese in Hong Kong.

Language change and value orientations in Chinese culture (Lu & Chen, 2011)

Worth a read if you are interested in what the research has to say about "bad" Chinese and its potential to corrupt the Chinese people! (Just kidding it's more about propaganda) May seem obvious at times though.

Englishization and language change in modern Chinese in Taiwan (Hsu, 1994)

Yes, for whatever reason the term "Englishization" was preferred over "Anglicization" at the time of writing but that shouldn't deter you from wanting to know about causes and effects of English in Taiwan. Couple this one with the above and you can talk about how maybe the true goal of people using "bad" Chinese is to democratize the government (100% joking).

General Language Change Papers (for some background)

The Lingua Franca Cycle: Implications for Language Shift, Language Change, and Language Classification (Burling, 2007)

A good primer on language change.

Lexical Change, Language Change (Von Schneidemesser, 2000)

A look at English lexical and language change and to what extent it is linked to cultural influences.

Antifunctionality in language change (Seuren & Hamans, 2010)

Looking at German & Dutch language change in a pretty theory-heavy way, while talking about functionality vs. "antifunctionality" and what they mean for language change.

Language Acquisition is Language Change (Crain, Goro & Thornton, 2006)

Not the biggest fan of the theory this one supports, but basically says that all languages are the same thing in our brains, shows cross-linguistically that change appears to follow recognizable patterns. (I thought perhaps relevant in that it claims sustainable changes in languages are only possible if they adhere to the underlying grammar)

Language Variation, Language Change and Perceptual Dialectology (Gessinger, 2010)

Standard vs. dialect in German with a nice part where some attitudes towards language changes are recorded as well as support for language change being a cycle (dialect forms becoming standard).

Beyond meatspace - or, Geeking out in e-English (Cheater, 2006)

A look at plain and simple lexical creativity/creation of neologisms and slang and their impact on language. (This one came out of China)

Creating and Contesting Signs in Contemporary Japan: Language Ideologies, Identity, and Community in Flux (Nakamura, 2006)

An example of active participation in structuring language change.

If you can't get access to the papers as PDF files somewhere on the internet, shoot me a PM and I'll hook you up.

tl;dr - Language change happens to all languages, languages don't need language contact to undergo language change, language change appears to be cyclical not degenerative...

[Guest realmayo]

Since you refer to my post, I'll ask if there was anything I wrote in it that your references contradict?

The Hong Kong written Chinese piece looks interesting but the only one I found online was Language change and value orientations in Chinese culture and yeah, as you say it's all pretty obvious, if that is a typical academic paper then my opinion of academics has suddenly shot down!

I'm still uncomfortable with the fundamentalist line that all languages are the same and language change in all languages is the same.

If all news media, films, tv, in the US were forced to use only Anglo Saxon style words and remove any trace of French or other Romance influence, then I bet you Americans would be speaking a very different form of English in 30 years time to how they speak now. From what you're saying, this is fine, natural, normal, and certainly no bad thing, and perfectly comparable to, say, the way that German has changed over the last 130 years.

But for me, that seems wrong.

I suppose it comes down to whether you think some languages are better than others. I think they are. For example that famous example of a tribe (in South America?) whose language describes location all in relation to a big mountain nearby: their language is better than English for them, but would be no good for airline pilots.

Now, if a language evolves gradually you can say that it is developing in synch with the society that uses is, and over time it will be a suitable and useful tool for that society.

But if there's some shock-change -- e.g. removing all Romance words from a language -- then for me that's different than gradual evolution. And I think it's wrong to bunch it all together as "language change happens to all languages". Like: a bus gets blown up; "ah well, death comes to us all". No!

Finally, the idea that language is just a tool. I have a problem with this, because it's wrong. It's like saying clothes are just to keep you warm and hide your sexy bits. But that's not true is it?

Lots of people care about how they look. Is it such a leap to think that lots of people also care about how they communicate?

[陳德聰]

Ah but therein lies the rub, lots of people care about how they look, but do they go around forcing other people to wear the same thing? I was posting a bunch of stuff because you seemed curious, I wasn't trying to contradict you at all... Quite frankly I was trying to contradict kenny.

Specifically with reference to your post, I just don't see the parallel between removing romance words (by the way, this simply would not work) from English to create a drastically different language and anglicization of Chinese... Or the parallel between the situation with Chinese and that hypothetical at all really.

As for the academic quality of that paper, it honestly read like the papers I proofread for my local friends in Shanghai, but the point is the slogan-propaganda-culture linkage.

I don't subscribe to "Universal Grammar", but there is a huge troupe of linguists out there that do, which is why I posted that one about the "fundamentalist line" that all languages are the same. I think it's a load of bull personally, but I don't know if I agree that being functionally able to handle certain semantic loads necessarily denotes whether a language is "better" than another one...

What I mean when I say that it's inevitable and normal is that historically it just happens over and over and over and over and over and over. If for whatever reason people were forced to use a limited version of the current English vernacular to communicate, in the scale of language shift in general that's not really a big thing, and likely however many years later, through the same processes of innovation that English used to get to where it is now, it would add a lot of vocabulary to express ideas that people feel they need words to express. This is why I don't like to use the word "evolution" when talking about language, because that would suggest that there is some sort of perfect form of language that all the world's languages are slowly trying to become. But the problem is that we already have the "perfect" form of language, all of the languages are the "perfect" language (perhaps in part because they can change to suit the needs of the society that uses them). I definitely don't think removing all words with romance roots from English is equivalent to killing it!

The way I see the situation with Chinese is that you have a rigid somewhat artificial standard, but a myriad of non-standard speakers, quasi-standard speakers, and even some standard speakers themselves that are constantly influencing and changing how people actually use the language in real-life situations in innovative ways. If you see an innovative use and you decry the degeneration of your language, culture, and society, I think that is a bit more than odd, really.

Lastly, I have never heard of this famous example of a mountain tribe... Will have to look into that, but google has not turned anything up so far.

[li3wei1]

realmayo:

You may be confusing the morality of the cause with the morality of the effect. It's 'wrong' to force an entire culture to change the way they speak. The result of this, when it happens (and it has happened many times), is just a language. English has so many latinate words because the Normans invaded and forcibly took over and imposed their language (among other things) on the losers. The language was similarly influenced by violent incursions from the Vikings. However you feel about the rightness or wrongness of these historical atrocities, the English language as we know it today is rich and fascinating language that has been used to create many works of great merit. It is worth learning. And part of its richness comes from the fact that it has had so much foreign influence forced upon it. Of course, another source of its richness is the foreign influence it has picked up from the cultures its users were subjugating and plundering. But the fact that a work of art is stolen doesn't make it any less beautiful.

[Guest realmayo]

li3wei1, sorry I wasn't clear: by wrong I meant it was incorrect to say that some drastic change imposed on a language by ideology+mass_communications is equivalent to the gradual evolution of a language.

For Normans/Vikings, I completely agree with you. I also agree when you say that English has a "richness [that] comes from the fact that it has had so much foreign influence forced upon it." Are you saying that's a good thing? In which case, you're suggesting that English benefited from that mixing? In which case if that mixing hadn't happened, the English language might have been less rich? And being less rich, it wouldn't be as good a language, as complex and nuanced a language, as the non-mixed hypothetical version?

This makes sense to me. And to remove a chunk of the language would make it worse, even if it still functioned as a tool.

Edit:

So: if someone proposed removing some of those features that add it its richness, you would say that's a bad idea and would resist, right? You wouldn't just say "this is inevitable changes that happen in every language".

[Guest realmayo]

陳德聰, with regards to Chinese, I wasn't just talking about anglicisation. How much has the Communist style of public speaking and writing influenced the choices people used to have (choosing which word/expression to use)? In the past people had to listen to loads of these speeches, read the newspapers, attend study groups, listen to their local or danwei leaders parotting the same ideological languages as the top guys in Beijing. Were there vocabularly, expressions or gramatical formulations which were deemed reactionary or too traditional, and therefore eliminated from the language? If the cultural revolution had gone on for 100 years, couldn't the situation have been analagous to the anti-Romance-words thing I was talking about?

............... and if so, wouldn't this consitute something clearly undesirable, versus the gradual evolution in languages which I have no problem with?

(I think "evolution" is an okay term because as currently used the term doesn't refer to a movement towards some teleological endpoint.)

Finally, I remain unconvinced that we should treat different languages the same. The pressures on Chinese are very different to those on English or Gaelic. As you say, Standard Chinese is an artificial standard, and it's backed by a state that has enormous control over the distribution of media, so changes to the standard could happen as a drastic change rather than the gradual evolution we agree is normal and unstoppable.

So: my gut says that it's daft to resist changes. But I can't shake the thought that my gut feeling may not take into account features of the Chinese language/history that do not exist in English.

That mountain tribe, maybe it's not famous, maybe I read it somewhere and assumed it was gospel -- I can't find it via googling but ... it still works as a hypothesis!

[Michaelyus]

This will veer off-topic a little, but: I think the most famous example of non-egocentric direction words (so no "left", "right", "front", "behind") is the Australian 'Aboriginal' language of Guugu Yimithirr, from Queensland. All direction words are cardinal. But cardinal or otherwise geographical directions as default directions in languages is not as uncommon as it may seem ... the Mayan language of Tzeltal in southern Mexico is another famous example, and it has been estimated about a third of the 7000 known languages primarily use fixed directionality (Levinson 2003). Even when there are egocentric direction words, sometimes cardinal direction words are favoured: they exasperated a Balinese dancing student who was studying in a new village, simply because his mapping of the cardinal directions was at variance with the teacher's, and although it seems the egocentric directions exist in the language, using them felt rather ungrammatical.

[陳德聰]

realmayo, I think maybe why I'm having trouble with your hypotheticals is that positive linguistic change (not "good" positive but additive positive) and negative (subtractive) linguistic change can happen at the same time, i.e. words fall out of use all the time, but new words are coined all the time too. Even if you don't believe in the free will that people have to use language however they want regardless of some sort of authoritarian movement to wipe all words of a certain kind out of the vernacular, the fact still remains that concepts that are important to people tend to get their own words, or will have a way of being expressed. Wipe one out, another one pops up.

I haven't made any quality judgments here because I still think that's silly. Of course I would resist that kind of thing, but that would be out of wanting to be able to use a language however the hell I want to, not specifically because "hey, I use those words all the time, now what am I going to do without them!?" If you tell me I am never allowed to say the word "cheese" again, I guess I will just have to start having "Cleese" with my wine. No matter how hard the government tries, it can't get rid of enough words to stop people from being able to complain if you know what I mean. You can remove all the pieces of a language you want, but the faculty for language remains the same. If the cultural revolution had continued on 'til now, we may have ended up with a very concise Chinese language, no flowery terms, but probably still able to talk about the same things.

As for your good vs bad thing, we really have to look at what you're defining as the purpose of language. You say nuance, complexity, quantity good, so I'm assuming simplicity is bad? So we ignore functionality? A hypothetical language that is syntactically the same as English, but has less morphemes, is therefore worse than English? I just think that's a really arbitrary judgment to make.

[Guest realmayo]

You say nuance, complexity, quantity good, so I'm assuming simplicity is bad?

Absolutely not. I think having all options open to you is best.

I think it's possible to imagine situations where your options as a speaker of a language get reduced. For language as a tool, sure, that's no big deal. Same way that if the only clothes dyes available were blue or black, it doesn't matter， the clothes will still keep you warm. But some people will want the option of wearing clothes that aren't just blue or black. Others will want the option of using a broader and historically-available array of language and expect that their listeners will understand.

Anyway, I don't think we're going to agree. You're wedded to the idea that no language change can ever be undesirable, and I'm not expert enough in this to express why I think change can sometimes be undesirable, except to repeat the clothing analogy: that function is of primary importance, sure, but once that is assured, lots of people then take form seriously too.

[li3wei1]

To say that something is a tool is not to limit its uses. Language can be used to find your way to the bus stop, or to tell someone how to boil noodles, but it can also be used to sell a product or yourself, to express your feelings, to incite feelings in others, to mark yourself as part of a group, to win an argument, to inspire a crowd to go flip over cars and burn shops.

And I think what 陈德聪 is saying is that whatever changes you try to make in a language, the users will make their own changes to adapt to the uses they need to put it to. So the eskimos have lots of words for snow, and we've got lots of words for money, and masturbation.