Groups > comp.lang.java.programmer > #21283

Re: java software naming question

From	Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject	Re: java software naming question
Date	2013-01-09 23:59 -0600
Organization	A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID	<kcllcg$7g0$1@dont-email.me> (permalink)
References	(1 earlier) <akvme8hvekujkgdt0ndjq0g827qa817fk5@4ax.com> <b094ad0b-ff6d-446c-aeee-766ec9560f1d@googlegroups.com> <n55ne8pq1e5i65fb0mfrfu3tjp3u5a7mvv@4ax.com> <kcg9ei$di6$1@dont-email.me> <edare81bupt3i8iad6hmtl5c952opqvv75@4ax.com>

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On 1/9/2013 11:40 AM, Roedy Green wrote:
> On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 23:05:15 -0600, Joshua Cranmer
> <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
> who said :
>
>> Given the pride many
>> Chinese have in having a hard-to-learn language, I doubt that Mandarin
>> Chinese will become a working lingua franca in the future.
>
> English is pretty hard to pronounce and is quite irregular. That did
> not stop it becoming the defacto world language.  That happened not
> because of any features of the language, but because of the success of
> the British Empire.

I think if you look at the timeline of the dominant language of 
diplomacy, French was replaced sometime in the 20th century, well after 
the British Empire had reached its apex. The rise of English as the 
primary world language is almost certainly due to the center of most 
scientific and technological research shifting to the United States; 
that Russian did not also become a major language in this era is 
probably due in part to the Sino-Soviet split and in part repercussions 
of how the communist systems worked.

> Mandarin might succeed for the same reason.

It probably won't for several reasons, largely a death by a thousand 
papercuts:
1. Exclude Mandarin from the Sino-Tibetan language family, and you'll 
find only around 100m speakers of those languages; exclude English from 
the Indo-European, and you'll find perhaps 2b speakers of those 
languages. An Indo-European lingua franca is more accessible to more 
people than a Sino-Tibetan one.

2. Nearly all keyboards in the world are set up to be able to easily 
input the Latin alphabet and script. A relatively small portion, 
especially outside China, are set up to be able to input Chinese characters.

3. Similar to the above, the US-ASCII subset of characters is the only 
set of characters that reliably works everywhere in practice on modern 
technologies. Non-ASCII characters still have conversion problems, 
although everyone is slowly starting to move towards UTF-8, UTF-16, or 
UTF-32.

4. The last 20 years has codified English--and particularly American 
English in terms of spellings--as the primary language of computers, 
which gives it an immense network effect in the low level; something 
that other languages (particularly Chinese) would find hard to break into.

5. Mere economic heft doesn't make a country's language global. Note 
that German never became a major global language, despite Germany being 
a major world power in the early 20th century; also note the distinct 
lack of Russian as a major global language, despite the USSR being a 
second superpower for about 50 years.

> I did some digging on computerised typesetting in Chinese just as
> electronic typesetting in English was getting off the ground. I went
> to visit a Chinese newspaper where women were keying into a DOS app.
> The speed was blinding.  It required memorising numbers for words.

I'm not a student of Chinese, but I recall that the characters are 
basically build up of unique sets of radicals, which offers, for 
example, a uniform way to look stuff up in dictionaries. I think most 
IMEs actually have you enter what amounts to the pinyin (Romanization of 
the text) and it will select an appropriate character.

> There were dozens of schemes for keying, all requiring much more skill
> than we have with QWERTY.  It would be interesting to learn how it
> shook down.  Today, even my own website can appear in Chinese by
> clicking a Google Translate button at the top of the page.  We may
> avoid the need for an interlanguage.

French is the only foreign language I know to any degree of accuracy, 
and I can assert that the state-of-the-art for machine translation of 
English<->French is only good enough to get you the gist of a text and 
would be inadequate for, e.g., anything you'd want to use as an official 
translation.

I have played with a toy called "Translation Party", which repeatedly 
translates between English and Japanese until an idempotent translation 
is achieved. The result quickly degrades in gibberish. As an example, 
one of the sentences in this post found equilibrium as the following:

   Most global language Russia 2 ）, provides a lack of Soviet agitation
   and 50-year-old superpower relationship.

I have noted as other examples the text doing things such as dropping 
the word "not" (substantively altering the meaning of the sentence). 
While Chinese is not Japanese, they both share the difficult 
characteristic of being so far removed from English that the grammar and 
word order look almost nothing alike at times, so I would assume both 
would have about the same levels of accuracy in terms of sensical 
translation (which is to say, very poor quality).

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not 
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth

Thread

java software naming question mcheung63@gmail.com - 2013-01-07 01:11 -0800
  Re: java software naming question "Aryeh M. Friedman" <Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 01:21 -0800
  Re: java software naming question "Aryeh M. Friedman" <Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 01:26 -0800
  Re: java software naming question Muco <muco@nomail.com> - 2013-01-07 20:38 +1100
    Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 11:12 -0800
  Re: java software naming question Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2013-01-07 07:03 -0800
    Re: java software naming question "Aryeh M. Friedman" <Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 07:08 -0800
    Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-07 08:34 -0800
      Re: java software naming question Magnus Warker <magnus@mailinator.com> - 2013-01-07 18:26 +0100
        Re: java software naming question markspace <markspace@nospam.nospam> - 2013-01-07 10:54 -0800
          Re: java software naming question "Chris Uppal" <chris.uppal@metagnostic.REMOVE-THIS.org> - 2013-01-07 19:41 +0000
            Re: java software naming question Eric Sosman <esosman@comcast-dot-net.invalid> - 2013-01-07 17:13 -0500
              Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-07 18:44 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-07 19:37 -0800
        Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-07 19:33 -0800
          Re: java software naming question Mark <i@dontgetlotsofspamanymore.invalid> - 2013-01-08 09:39 +0000
            Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-08 20:26 -0500
              Re: java software naming question Mark <i@dontgetlotsofspamanymore.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:32 +0000
                Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-09 18:41 -0500
                Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-09 16:23 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Mark <i@dontgetlotsofspamanymore.invalid> - 2013-01-10 09:44 +0000
                Re: java software naming question lipska the kat <"nospam at neversurrender dot co dot uk"> - 2013-01-10 10:16 +0000
                Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-12 17:07 -0500
                Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-12 17:03 -0500
  Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 11:11 -0800
    Re: java software naming question lipska the kat <lipskathekat@yahoo.co.uk> - 2013-01-07 19:48 +0000
    Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-07 18:56 -0500
      Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 16:05 -0800
  Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-07 18:55 -0500
  Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-07 18:04 -0800
    Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 18:33 -0800
      Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-07 19:57 -0800
        Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-07 20:11 -0800
        Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-07 23:05 -0600
          Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:40 -0800
            Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 11:18 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2013-01-09 11:59 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 23:20 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Stuart <DerTopper@web.de> - 2013-01-10 09:32 +0100
              Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-10 01:09 -0600
            Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-09 23:59 -0600
              Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 23:36 -0800
        Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-07 21:46 -0800
      Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-07 21:58 -0600
        Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-08 00:19 -0800
        Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-08 00:22 -0800
          Re: java software naming question "Aryeh M. Friedman" <Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 00:30 -0800
            Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:41 -0800
            Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 10:51 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-09 23:27 -0600
          Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 07:07 -0800
            Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-08 09:31 -0600
              Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 07:36 -0800
          Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-08 08:47 -0800
            Re: java software naming question Stuart <DerTopper@web.de> - 2013-01-08 21:56 +0100
              Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 13:04 -0800
            Re: java software naming question Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2013-01-08 14:14 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 15:19 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-08 16:22 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Mark <i@dontgetlotsofspamanymore.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:34 +0000
              Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:50 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-09 10:10 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 10:49 -0800
            Re: java software naming question Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-08 20:37 -0500
        Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-08 00:26 -0800
          Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 07:12 -0800
            Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-08 09:27 -0600
              Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 07:32 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:55 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-09 12:53 -0800
                Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 23:37 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-01-08 08:50 -0800
          Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-08 09:26 -0600
            Re: java software naming question Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-09 09:59 -0800
              Re: java software naming question Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2013-01-09 23:31 -0600
    Re: java software naming question "Aryeh M. Friedman" <Aryeh.Friedman@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 00:24 -0800
  Re: java software naming question johnjagu25@gmail.com - 2013-01-08 08:39 -0800

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