Re: English SUCKS, Chinese is the only language you need!!

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

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"Mike Smith" <kld_msmith@earthlink.nospam.net> writes:
>Define "widely".  There certainly are an awful lot of Chinese-speakers in
>the world.  But English is spoken in countries on every continent of the
>globe (except South America? - I mean national tongue, not that one or more
>people speak it).

Hm.  I've lived in four different Anglophone countries, and all of them
had plenty of Chinese people living there.  If you count countries where
the official language is the same, Spanish is probably more `widely'
spoken than English.  But why count countries rather than people?  And
how `official' does it have to be?  Election papers in this state are
distributed in about 10 languages.

>One hears English-language songs on
>European radio all the time, but one almost never hears
>non-English-language songs on American radio (I can't speak for
>Commonwealth nations).

Well, that says a lot about America, but very little about English.
My two favourite TV channels here are the ABC (Australian Broadcasting
Corporation) and the SBS (Special Broadcasting Services).  The SBS shows
a lot of foreign films on SBS (with subtitles, thankfully; the number of
non-English languages I understand _well_ could be counted on the fingers
of one knee).  The Deutsche-Welle news is regularly shown in several
languages (and very good it is too), and there are plenty of radio
broadcasts in other languages, notably including Chinese.

>but certainly English is more "widely" spoken than Chinese.

For _some_ definitions of "widely", yes.
And for _some_ definitions of "spoken".
For example, I read COBOL fairly well, but almost never write it.
Do I count as a "speaker" of COBOL or not?
Does a Panamanian who _can_ speak English but seldom has occasion to
count as an English speaker or not?
Do you count the speakers of Kriol in this country, or Tok Pijin in PNG,
as "English" speakers or not?

All of this matters in this thread only because of the programming analogues.
On the evidence I've seen, the number of _fluent_ C "speakers" is vanishingly
small.  And then there are all the retread C programmers calling themselves
C++ programmers, without using that fluently either.

Once upon a time, the majority of human beings used stone tools.
Where would we be now, if we let 'the majority' tell us what tools to use?
-- 
John �neas Byron O'Keefe; 1921/02/04-1997/09/27; TLG,TLTA,BBTNOTL.
Richard A. O'Keefe; RMIT Comp.Sci; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok