Will Chinese Replace En

Will Chinese Replace English?
    Good morning everyone. Today, we are going to talk about the possibilities of Chinese taking the place of English as the global language. As we all know, Chinese has been widely used in East Asia for thousands of years. It was supposed to be the leading global language, but an accident happened. English quite by chance took its place. Will Chinese seize the place? For me, I would say it is possible! Because Chinese has many advantages over European languages including English. Let me share my reasons with you.
     First of all, Chinese, especially Chinese characters, is more stable than European languages. An average student of higher schools in China can easily read the books, say The Analects, which were written 2000 years ago.  But a Ph.D. of native England can hardly read the books their ancestor wrote 500 years ago. In China, a pupil of primary school can easily read The Romance of Three Kingdoms which was written more than 600 years ago.  Because Chinese is an ideographic language in which the characters are generally true to their ideas while European languages including English are phonetic languages in which the words should be principally true to their pronunciations. For hundreds of years the pronunciation changed, as a result words of English changed; but characters of Chinese remained almost the same. In the next five hundred years, God alone knows what English will become. But Chinese, I predict confidently, will not change so much, especially its writing.
    Next in order, Chinese is more compatible especially the writing Chinese. Some experts in the ISO (international standard organization) classify Chinese as a language family which contains Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Minnan Chinese, Wu Chinese etc. In the speaking sense it’s definitely right, but in writing sense it’s absolutely wrong. We should admit that the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese is greater than that between English and German.  But that is just in speaking. In writing they are almost the same. No matter what kind of Chinese you speak, you can easily communicate with others by writing, because all kinds of Chinese are compatible in the way of using Chinese characters. So Chinese should be identified as one language. But English is different. Although English is considered as one language, an American is quite hard to understand Indian English and African English. Within just 100 years of changing, Americans have difficulties to understand Indian English and African English. In another 100 years Indian English may be identified as an independent language, not English any more. So may African English, Singaporean English, and even Chinese English. But different kinds of Chinese, which underwent thousands of years of changing, are still well compatible. People in the UK have a pride of their language. “English—A global language; English—A global language!” Everyday everywhere they say this. But this is a false pride. Indians speak and write in English, but in their own English, not the global one. So do Chinese, Singaporeans and Africans.
    Thirdly, written Chinese is more informative. Chinese characters carry far more information than any other language. In the five official languages of the United Nations, Chinese is the most informative. According to the report by Benjamin K. Tsou in the Language Information Sciences Research Centre of City University of Hong Kong, the Entropy of Alphabets or Characters is Chinese 9.65 bits, followed by Russian 4.35 bits, then English 4.03 bits, Spanish 4.01 bits and French 3.98 bits. We can put it in another way to understand the report like this:  if we use 100 pieces of paper to write a novel in English, it needs only 42 in Chinese, which is nearly 60 percent less than English. If the US uses Chinese as its official language, it will save at least half of its forest that is used to produce paper. So do computer disk and anything that is related to writing. The United States is always trying to save resources and protect the environment. One of the best ways, I suggest here, is to let Chinese become the official language, because Chinese is more informative and will save a lot of resources.
    Fourthly, Chinese runs faster. Take memorizing time table for an example.  English students take 1.5 times longer to read the table than Chinese student do, and correspondingly take 1.5 times longer to memorize it, according to the essay Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics by Yuen-Ren Chao, a Chinese American linguist. It was also found that reading Chinese is also much faster than reading English, because Chinese is an ideographic language that is very suitable for silent reading. When a Chinese student reads three books, an American student may just read one. No wonder why Chinese students of high schools get more Olympic prizes in science.
Finally, Chinese is more vigorous in front of the challenge what is called the information explosion.  Everyday lots of English words or terms are coined. There is going to be a vocabulary explosion of English, which really become a big challenge. Lots of new words or terms are created in Chinese as well. But this does not become a problem, because a Chinese new word typically composes of two or three characters which imply its meaning.  
A Chinese person can easily understand a new word which he/she has never seen. Let’s take a look at one example. China didn’t have wine until the westerner brought it to China. In Chinese “wine” is translated as pu tao jiu in which pu tao means grape and jiu means a kind of beverage which contains alcohol. Every Chinese speaker can easily understand the meaning of pu tao jiu without any explanation or looking up a dictionary.
All right. Here are all my reasons to entertain the possibilities of Chinese as a global language. A point of warning, though. I am not trying to say that Chinese is superior to English or vice versa. I am just saying that we should not take it for granted that English will be the solely possible global language in the world.