I should add that there is a way out for china -- high skilled production, but they are really shooting themeselves in the foot on that one. High skilled production requires input of low-skilled labor, and after several decades of what looked like it could be a rapprochement, since the ascendancy of Xi Jinping, china has increasingly alienated its closest neighbors (phillipines, vietnam, taiwan, japan, south korea, india), some of whom would be ideal sources of low-skill inputs. And a LOT of their tech comes from copying the west. That will get you only so far; to be truly innovative and successful in the high-skill arena you need to have a source of creativity and critical thought which after a short period of flourishing, I hear is being repressed by the state again these days (I don't know for certain, I'm not in china).
China has a vast hinterland of rural Chinese, much larger than the Phillipines or Vietnam could supply, and there's less of a language barrier, where not none. Personally I think they'll do better than many are expecting, the biggest threat to their success being their own governance.
> China has a vast hinterland of rural Chinese, much larger than the Phillipines or Vietnam could supply
Whose fertility has for the last several decades taken a historically massive hit from one child, sex-selective abortion and the policy of taking young rural women to single-sex urban dorms to provide their once cheap labor. A rural region with increasingly middle aged farmers with a rapidly shrinking highly gender imbalanced youth is not a recipe for medium to long term abundant labor supply. Certainly, China’s economy is a profligate debt fueled fever, however, their biggest bill coming due is the demographics.
They're doing okay on the TFR front compared to South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan. And their past birth rate being <2.0 helps a lot to limit the likelihood of revolution and keeps them from consuming all their natural resources. The problems you describe are financial. The misallocation of resources associated with the debt fueled fever is a spent cost. They can deal with the population pyramid by letting the old be poor.
People who speak other Chinese languages are translating to and from written Mandarin. They are not taught to write their spoken language. Nobody would read it if they did.
Spelling with Chinese characters is a tricky business. It is not enough to write the syllables; for each of ~1200 syllables there are several characters to choose from. Which to use in each word is purely a product of history, but the rules people learn are only for Mandarin.
It is funny that Chinese people who only know Mandarin mostly don't know this; it is not safe to talk about in China. So, Cantonese speakers let them continue to believe that Cantonese is "just pronounced differently", rather than being a whole language of its own. (Are French and Spanish just dialects of Latin?)
"Dialect" here means mutually intelligible. Mutual intelligibility is a fuzzy threshold, incidentally. I was in Spain once hanging out with an Italian guy. The Spanish speakers around could make sense of his Italian but he couldn't make sense of their Spanish. I think the essential problem was that they were more interested in understanding him than he was in understanding them, so they put in more effort.
Hypothesis: The Italian guy might have a better chance of picking up Spanish if the Spaniards were to speak a bit slower than usual :) Especially at the fuzzy mutual intelligibility boundary, a lower communication speed helps.
They don't; what do you think it would mean for two different languages to "share a written language"? Everyone is trained to read and write Mandarin; writing other dialects is not encouraged.
But more than that, China is hard at work at ensuring that all Chinese speak Mandarin.
Mandarin is not written Chinese to my knowledge. There are simplified and traditional Chinese in written form. Mandarin is close to how Northern Chinese speak and can be written in both form without any difficulty and most of times equivalent
Edit: perhaps you mean other Chinese dialects use different words to describe something - commonly seen in Southern dialects which inherits more from ancient Chinese. However for many common esp professional sentence the written form is universal
> Mandarin is not written Chinese to my knowledge. […] Source: I’m native Chinese
You are confusing written language with writing system, probably due to domestic and global propaganda efforts that have been going on for 70 years. This really undermines the scientific effort of linguists and just sows confusion, as evidenced by your mislabelling languages as dialects, and forcing the rest of the world to invent new words like "topolect" for existing concepts that the communist party does not like to be true.
My writing system is the Latin alphabet. I can write the languages Danish, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian etc. etc. with it.
Another writing system is the Cyrillic alphabet. I can write Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian etc. with it.
So the writing system is an orthogonal concept to the written language.
As an analogue, the writing system we are discussing is the Chinese characters. One can write with it for example Cantonese, classical Chinese, Hokkien, Japanese, Mandarin, Zhuang, among others.
The distinction between traditional and simplified you mentioned is minor and not a fundamental property of the language written with it. Example: Cantonese can be and is written in both simplified and traditional.
> the written form is universal
That's not true. The languages Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin belong to the same family (Sinitic) but have different grammar, lexicon and word order; these differences are also reflected in writing.
"Latin alphabet" is ambiguous, you understood this to mean "the classical Latin alphabet", I was sloppy and meant "the set of letters in the Latin alphabets that make up the Latin script". Now it's my turn to call you out for a very strained sense because in contrast "Latin script" is well defined and I see you are straying away from the definition for some reason.
ø, ç, ß and ő are definitely part of the Latin script.¹ Any Latin letter was added to the set at some point in time; the definition makes no special distinction for this fact.
> here's Russian Cyrillic for "restaurant": PECTOPAH
That's not how scripts work. Those are Latin look-alikes (homoglyphs). These are the correct letters: РЕСТОРАН
Just because the letters have a common ancestor, it does not mean they are the same today.
> a way in which Russian writing differs from Latin script, but Danish writing doesn't?
Russian uses the Cyrillic script (specifically Cyrillic letters from the Russian alphabet), Danish uses the Latin script.² The scripts are distinct sets. It's quite tautological when I write it that way, but I don't know how else I can makeself understood.
¹ In a technical sense, we are constrained here on this Web site by communicating within the confines of Unicode. You could look up the properties of "ø" and see that it is indeed a letter in the Latin script: `\p{General_Category=Letter}` `\p{Script=Latin}` Currently, there are 1335 registered in this set product. The properties don't come from nowhere: Unicode merely codifies what was already linguistically/sociologically agreed upon beforehand. IMO the standard is not quite as expressive as e.g. me sitting next to you with pencil and paper, but good enough for most practical purposes.
² As always, there are exceptions for niche uses and because human language is a messy concept, but we can ignore that and concentrate on the broad strokes. An example for an exception would be that names mentioned in a Latin script embedding are typically transliterated/adapted instead of remaining in Cyrillic, e.g. "Puschkin"/"Puškins"; that's a Russian word, but written in Latin.
I think something is lost in translation since first reaction to normal Chinese is Mandarin == 普通话 whose direct meaning is about spoken form. As I think deeper you are mostly correct although I still think writing language, system and the dialects need a quite formal definition and the difference is subtle. Educated Chinese learns ancient Chinese, read some book written in traditional Chinese, laugh at comedy spoken with “topplect” and watch many Hongkong Movies, there aren’t many gaps in understanding.
Historically many dialects evolves from different races that has invaded China and get absorbed(including CCP). In written form it converges to Chinese system. It makes the topic more confusing - does those count as languages
In China, people refer to written Chinese as 中文, whereas the spoken language as 普通话, 汉语, etc. Colloquially people sometimes say 中文 to mean the spoken language, but that's imprecise.
There's a specific word in Chinese for the written language. The Chinese words for Mandarin are specifically for the spoken "dialect". Your writing system vs language distinction doesn't really apply in this case. Different Chinese languages are mutually intelligible when read by speakers of another "dialect" of Chinese, though another dialect may come across oddly. Ask any Chinese.
Clone legacy tech, leapfrog at the cutting edge. Masterful strategic execution, hats off to China.
One example. Drones have proven to be a strategic gamechanger in the 2020 Azeri-Armenian war. In the same league with the musket, the machine gun, the tank, the airplane, the carrier. Who is the world leader in commercial drones? DJI, a Chinese company. US market share? 76%. It's not even close.
is there anything cutting edge about DJI products aside from volume? TBH I think probably the only thing truly special about DJI is that their software interface actually works, but in the world of "all software" it's still pretty janky (the bar is low in drone-world).
I'm addressing the condescending Western trope, IMHO stemming from denial, that China somehow lacks 'a source of creativity and critical thought' to be 'truly innovative and successful in the high-skill arena'. Commercial drones, mobile computing, 5G, Internet. High skill high growth industries that barely existed 25 years ago where China is at least on par with the West, and with evergrowing market share.
Well I'm an American born asian, and I've worked with 1) Chinese professors, postdocs and grad students and 2) Chinese postdocs who did their undergrad in the US. The difference in creativity levels is night and day.
That's intriguing. My original comment was longer and included https://macropolo.org/digital-projects/the-global-ai-talent-.... A plurality of top AI researchers are Chinese. The Chinese undergrad pipeline appears very strong. If China figures a way to keep over half of its most promising undergrads from moving to US for grad school and/or work, chances are there would be a new unquestionable top tech dog (err, dragon) of the XXI century.
haha I mean not just china, but it's not like the worldwide AI pipeline is rife with innovation these days. Do you watch Yannic Kilcher's paper reviews?
I keep waiting for a model that will do something I want (image -> language with a transformer model that doesn't have a fixed token length during training). I have been waiting for about 3 years, haven't seen it yet.
You can't measure innovation by bulk flow of humans through a system. If anything if you force too many humans through a pipeline that needs innovation you risk kneecapping progress because the separation of wheat and chaff becomes quadratically harder, increasingly gamed, and the people who actually have talent and creativity inevitably burn out and fuck off to do something else.
