[gyomu]

Chinese engineers clearly have no problems building specific, technical things; just like Chinese surgeons have no problems carrying out specific, technical surgeries, etc.

So how is the language "strictly less technical and specific"? Can you give specific and technical examples?

[tsunamifury]

Mandarin is a courtly language full of back out vagueness and high context construction. This is simply a product of the society. It’s not a judgement of right or wrong it simply just is.

Rote Surgery is not a good example compared to say writing a PRD about an unknown feature.

I am in no way saying Chinese people cannot do these things. I am saying in mandarin it is less specific and more circumspect ways of getting there.

I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.

[gyomu]

> I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.

I'm not sure why you're getting so defensive; I indeed don't speak Chinese, hence why I'm asking a question.

A claim like "Chinese as a language is less technical and specific than English and slows progress" seems pretty grand; and if Chinese people failed to launch satellites in orbit or do brain surgery you could point to that; but they don't seem to be held back by their language when it comes to making specific, technical achievements, so I'm curious to hear actual, concrete details or examples about what makes Chinese a "less technical and specific" language.

It sounds like your answer is "it simply just is, because it's a courtly language" - which is not a very satisfying answer, intellectually speaking.

[abeppu]

I don't speak Mandarin but is this not an issue of style rather than the language itself? English can be courtly or poetic or abstruse but that's a matter of the speaker making a bunch of choices. I can't help but think of "Yes Minister" and Humphrey Appleby working quite skillfully to communicate in a way that ensured he would not be understood. Do Mandarin speakers not also have such a range of choices to be clear or not?

[numpad0]

Say what you want about Sapir-Whorf, but it's just the reality that translation of anything to anything is generally gibberish. It's just a fact. The more literal it gets, the less coherent it will be. A complete word-for-word "translation" is just garbage out.

Was that Chinese text actually being ambiguous, or was that translations you were given being nonsensical/having so much context errors? The latter is kind of an expected behavior for translated technical texts, and that has nothing to do with whether Chinese are illogical bunches(why even bother contacting if that were ever the case...)

[jimbokun]

You are talking about culture, not the language.

[noirscape]

It's not related to Chinese in specific, but in civilian air traffic, the lingua franca is specifically English[0]. The reason for this is because other languages leave too much room for interpretation. One incident not mentioned in that page that's worth bringing up is Korean Air Flight 801; the crew recognized an issue with the instruments quite a bit before the crash, but because the flight crew essentially was too polite in notifying the captain of the issue, the captain instead asserted authority with incomplete information, leading to the plane crashing[1].

Language specificity and cultural encoding in those languages can have a pretty major impact on its clarity, especially in critical situation. Speaking a secondary language instead can avoid that sort of thing simply because being a non-native speaker, you'll be a good deal more blunt in that language.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801

[_jss]

Malcolm Gladwell's description of that accident and amplification is simplistic and not very accurate. There were many errors made that caused that accident, including ATC failing to follow protocol.

English is the language of aviation because in 1951 the countries with the most living pilots and aircraft spoke English. It is not because of any trait particular to English.

[gwd]

But that's more psychological than linguistic: The Korean language could certainly express, "we're about to crash"; and a foreigner in that cockpit would certainly have found a way to be more direct. It's much easier to break social restrictions in another language.

[numpad0]

It's just that pilots have no capacity left to be fluent in every languages everywhere. You don't avoid ambiguity speaking in the second language in a critical situation, you just incur significant responsiveness plus bandwidth penalty.

There are few recordings of aircraft emergencies over Japan on YouTube. Two obvious things in those recordings are that local pilots drop pretense of speaking Engurish in almost any non-normal conditions, and that local ATCs are dangerously useless outside of normal conditions. There's nothing visibly helpful from using English in there.