Natural Science Forum / Physics / General Physics / March 2008

Apparently "Uncle Al" is not familiar with China.

Yesterday, I was browsing though the books at a huge
book store at the Xidan shopping center in Beijing,

and that store, and many book stores in China
have far more technical books on all technical subjects
than ANY book store I have seen in America,
and for that matter any university library.

There used to be (And still is?)
a large book store in Toronto that is very impressive,
but has a fraction of the books, and technical books,
as many Chinese book stores.

It is interesting to note
that book stores in China are like libraries,
in the sense that people sit around and read the books,
even when they don't buy them.
Surprisingly the books are never abused,
and they still look like new even after being read.

Survival and growth always depend on adaptability.  The English
language has survived and grown because it freely borrows vocabulary
from whatever language is at hand, and has no compunction against
coining new words (e.g. "internet") as needed.

Chinese finds it extremely difficult to adopt words from other
languages (many sounds are hard to produce in Chinese), and the basic
language structure is highly tonal, resulting in many words that sound
the same to the untutored ear having widely disparate meanings.  Add a
graphic system with thousands of characters and you have a language
that works only for a very slowly changing society. (Read: "low
adaptability")

The Chinese speakers may outnumber English speakers in this world by
roughly four-to-one, but the proportion of English-speaking people is
growing much faster.

My mother, a career proofreader, had a favorite simile: "busier than a
Chinese typesetter."  Try to imagine a keyboard that can accommodate
thousands of characters.  Manual typing will NEVER take place on such
a keyboard at 40+ words per minute.

Tom Davidson
Richmond, VA