麻將 - Mahjong

With my recent interest in traditional word-games it dawned on me that, as a family, we are more numerically inclined.  Having said this there has been a pocket of interest amongst the younger members of the household in Scrabble but still numbers are our "thing".  Anne and I started a discussion the other day about Mahjong and how as students we used to play with another couple we knew.  This is traditional Mahjong, not the version that is often created on computer games which is some pair matching exercise.  So after a brief search on 'tinternet, checking the veracity and authenticity of the vendor, we purchased a set.  It has yet to arrive but as I was in the mood for kick starting the economy, I invested in one of Mr Jobs' Apps for the iPad.  I nice little example of the game with a full explanation of the scoring, something I was struggling to remember.  So I dived into my first game.  It came back pretty quickly but the AIs were thrashing me relentlessly.  After a few hands I was over 3500 points down.  Pretty impressive, overshadowed only by the next achievement, a 7500 point win in a single game.  I think I'll quit whilst I'm ahead.

Sinophone

I am not a sinophone, I think eventually we may all have to become at least partionally sinophonic. 

I've been regularly reading articles on http://www.kurzweil.net/ with interest but today one arrived in my twitter stream that disappointed me.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/globa-accelerating-technologies-will-create-a-global-state-by-2050

So I have submitted a comment and I am awaiting its approval:

The “Global Language Snowball Effect”

I think some of the fundamental facts have been missed here. Chinese is (one of) the fastest growing langauge(s) on the internet (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm) , it is probably more likely that some derivative of Chinese will become the global language, if such a global language were to develop.

It was also disappointing to read the following:

” It will certainly not be Chinese, since the world will utterly reject China’s incredibly clumsy and stupid writing system”

From a non sinophone perspective this may be a much held view but is it really a sensible view. To express it in such a clumsy and inarticulate manner just detracts from what was quite an interesting premise. A small bit of research would show you the variety and richness of the languages that are similar to Chinese. A little further research might have shown you that despite your (and my) ignorance of the language it is a powerful analytic language that depends on sytanx rather than morphology.
I suggest this article is edited to remove what appears to be xenophobic content that adds little to the debate.

I wonder if it will be added?