so NOT true, Josh, for Mandarin you need a very good ear to be able to hear and learn the different tones that change the meaning of one word to another meaning, Esperanto doesn't have that (the tone thing is too complicated), making it MUCH friendlier, plus, it's very easy to learn Esperanto, it's not easy to learn Mandarin at all.

>> In a nutshell, that which makes Esperanto superior to other European languages is only more true of Mandarin.<<

Much persuasion, little to no argumentation.

I would ask you, again, to lay out your arguments. Consider me to know little to nothing of Mandarin aside from where it is spoken (which is true).

Hmm, Josh I wonder if you'll be attending the universal Esperanto conference in Bejing this year to try and convince them of your position?

In Mandarin of course ;0)

> this is a rather recent development which has occurred within about the last 500 years, due in large part, arguably to political consequences of overcentralizaton in China, itself, and of the cultural annexation of the Americas by Europe. Things could just suddenly (over 100 years or so) switch back any time

There's a difference between learning a language because it's politically, economically, or socially advantageous (as when educated people learned French during the Napoleonic era), and learning it because one has no choice (as when native Indians learned Spanish after Spain conquered the Americas outright). Even if China becomes the undisputed superpower of our era, the only way Mandarin will supplant the Western languages' foothold in the world is if it does so the same way Europe did it and conquers and colonizes the planet. Which is partially why, even after Japan's economic and technological ascendency in the 80s, only a handful of businessmen ever bothered to learn Japanese. For the most part, no one wants to take the trouble to learn a new language unless they absolutely must, and the more difficult and/or alien the language is to one's own, the less likely one will bother with it. And for most countries in the world, that pretty much rules out Mandarin.

> particularly if people start using Pinyin

Pinyin certainly is a great advantage over the traditional logographs, but it's still pretty awkward to use, what with the numbers inserted into words to indicate the various tones. The fact that Mandarin must use tones at all (on account of its endless homonyms) -- which few other languages do and is very difficult for non-native speakers to master -- makes Mandarin a poor choice of lingua franca, with or without Pinyin.

(A lot of people I know who started learning Esperanto stopped because they couldn't get the accusative case down; how much more unwilling would they be to learn it if all the words sounded so much alike that they could only be distinguished by subtle tones?)

> But are we supposed to study Esperanto to use it in our lifetime or are we studying it because of the long-term prospects it represents for our progeny?

I would say we should study Esperanto (or whatever) in much the same way the rest of the world has been studying English since WWII, which is to say from grade school on up (or so I've heard). Start teaching them when they're young and have no choice; adults who do have a choice will never bother with it.

> The big problem with Chinese writing you've mentioned is that it is a language meant to be easily read by those who practice reading it, regardless of their local dialect, but it is a difficult language to write because of the comparatively large gap between recognition and recall. Pinyin fixes this UTTERLY.

Yes, Chinese political upheavals aside, the Chinese system of writing itself is a large part of the reason Jon-Hee can't read: just as "whole word" learning made it more difficult for American students to become fully literate, the Chinese logographic system of writing makes literacy a much more daunting task than it would otherwise be. And yes, Pinyin would remedy that, but the Chinese aren't likely to adopt it any more than the Japanese are likely to universally adopt Romanji -- after all, for them, it's a Westernized bastardization of thousands of years of tradition.


Mandarin may have its merits, but comparing them to those of the Latin-based languages is like comparing the Be OS to Unix: Be might be just as good or better than Unix, but Unix is already at the foundation of most of the Internet, and no matter how popular Be might someday miraculously become, Be gurus will still have to learn Unix if they want to run the servers that run the Web.