With largest national population in the world and an additional diaspora that I'm guessing is probably largest in the world all toiling dutifully away for what will no doubt be the largest economy in the world within 20 or 30 years - and they're worried about a few English phrases slipping into their media - they're worried about the purity of the Chinese language being under threat by coinages like 'GDP' - purity, important notion, fascists like their purity - well, let's not go crazy here with the fascism - still, if wars are in part about culture and culture is an expression of language, then... a deluded hysterical alarmist might say the first shot has been fired.The move comes after a growing number of national legislators and political advisors called for preventive measures to preserve the purity of the Chinese language."If we don't pay attention and don't take measures to stop mixing Chinese with English, the Chinese language won't remain pure in a couple of years," said Huang Youyi, editor-in-chief of the China International Publishing Group and secretary-general of the Translators' Association of China."In the long run, Chinese will lose its role as an independent linguistic system for passing on information and expressing human feelings," he told China Daily in an earlier interview.According to his proposal, all documents and speeches of top government officials should be written in pure Chinese, without the use of English abbreviations such as GDP, WTO or CPI.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
It begins [as in alarmist some might say hysterical or prone to fits of delusion China thinking begins slow morph into reality]:
