Scoot Over, Roman Letters!

As a relative latecomer to the Internet--despite the tech savviness of my generation--I had been wondering about the possibility of writing web addresses--you do call them "addresses", don't you?--in a non-Roman script. While I'm sure it's old news to those who are more wired to technology developments than me, imagine my delight when I read this, which suggests that web addresses in Devanagari, for instance, may not be that far from reality.

Having web addresses in multiple scripts will perhaps lead to a greater segmentation of the Web. Certain websites will perhaps be less accessible to people who are not familiar with certain scripts. But just imagine what a richer and more adventurous place the Web will be; and how amazing this is for language diversity.

The Mandarin Onslaught

I read this article in The New York Times, which describes, if my understanding is correct, a good example of a "language punctuation" as outlined by the "punctuated equilibrium" model for languages. Proposed by R. M. W. Dixon, this model argues that the plights and fortunes of languages can be explained by great--sometimes even cataclysmic--"events", providing an alternative to the view that languages evolve as part of language "family trees." For those not familiar with the punctuated equilibrium model and are interested to know more, I strongly recommend Dixon's lucid, layman-friendly--I should know--and majestically titled book The Rise and Fall of Languages.

In the New York Times article, the immigration of Mandarin speakers is a great demographic event that upsets the previous linguistic equilibrium in Chinatown, paving the way for a new steady state that elevates Mandarin as a lingua franca at the expense of Cantonese.