Chinglish - Reading in Doe Part 1

So the other day I was in Doe Library on the Berkeley campus. There's a magazine room on the second floor, so I thought it would be nice to sit in a big comfy chair reading magazine articles on real life printed pages. One article in Wired I found particularly interesting was about "Chinglish." I'm sure you know what Chinglish is - it's the butchering of the English language by native Chinese speakers.

The article is a month old now, so maybe you've come across it already. The main point of the article is about how English has become so successful (might as well be the universal language), that naturally there are now more nonnative English speakers trying to adopt the language than there are native English speakers, which can lead to a form of English being developed in China that is a completely different dialect than what we speak. Is the world still isolated enough that these different dialects can still pop up? Given Singaporean English aka Singlish, it seems entirely possible. By dialect I don't just mean a different accent. It's already pretty impossible to even get rid of the fob accent, and who cares? There are many many different accents in America alone. What's more interesting is grammatical structure. As the article points out, Chinese and English have very very different forms of grammar. It makes sense that a Chinese speaker would try to formulate sentences in their native structure, much like I will sometimes speak Chinese using an English sentence structure to the bemusement of my parents. And in isolation, the transference of grammatical structure seems possible.

Some of the evidence that they give is horribly translated English, what we traditionally think of as Chinglish. But I don't think Chinese speakers will start to call handicapped bathrooms, "deformed man lavatories." Ok ok fine, I'm sure this was just a funny example to get me to read the article. And it worked.

But I am somewhat skeptical if this type of Chinglish will develop into the same kind of a standard that Singlish is. The goal of learning how to speak English is to communicate with other English speakers or someone who speaks a different language than you do, so there must be some accordance in grammar otherwise there can be a lot of confusion. Then again, English is a needlessly complex language, so maybe some simplification isn't a terrible idea. Let's just do away with verb tenses. I'm not a historian nor a linguist, so who knows what kind of English will develop. I'm certainly not arguing against the possibility as presented in the article. In any case, this got me into thinking about Joss Whedon's Firefly, and how sometimes the characters would spout really horribly pronounced Chinese (usually curses). This was due to Whedon thinking that in the future, with the large amount of Chinese speakers, eventually some of it will become integrated into our every day language, much like French and Latin phrases are and so on.

I will say this though. Using online translators can lead to some awesome translations. Try translating something in English to another language and back. There's a good chance you might receive something vaguely poetic. If I could go back in time I would love to have tried to pass something off like that as poetry in my middle school/high school classes. Or, this might happen:
Bye. I mean, zai jian.