Or it may be done so that people don't get to know how certain events or phenomena are named in English and therefore search for them in Chinese rather than in English, and get much more loyal-to-China results on average.
(1) Languages that borrow don't just borrow when they "need" to. For example, most languages have perfectly good ways to communicate "okay", but may borrow it nonetheless. But over time the borrowing may displace the native words or limit their applicability. The Chinese may be anxious that sinitic words will shrink in semantic scope once widespread borrowing takes over. This is not a disaster from a linguistic point of view, of course; it is just language change. But those that deem foreign borrowings illegitimate out of a sense of nationalism will be left with a sense of a shrinking language. Perhaps this is an element in the chauvinism you mentioned.
(2) In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes a language harder to learn, cf. English. I don't know if the Chinese government deserves credit for realizing this, though.
In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes a language harder to learn, cf. English.
That's an empirical claim. Is there any evidence to back that up? In particular, is there any standardized way to characterize which languages have more diverse etymologies and which have less? Is there a standardized way to compare the difficulty of learning languages as a second language in the abstract (as contrasted with the difficulty of learning some particular language given a particular first-language background)?
I get the distinct impression, from my acquaintance with people from all over the world, that many second-language learners think learning English is rather easy, not least because there are so very many opportunities to be exposed to English and to practice English all over the world.
Yes, Yes, and Yes. Languages and the relationships between them has received a lot of attention / study. Grated not all linguistic family's have received the same attention but there are thousands of reasonably distinct languages most of which have been reasonably well documented.
PS: Learning the language is not just about learning _ as a second language, primary schools spend a lot of time teaching the proper way to communicate. And English requires far more instruction time than some other closely related languages like Spanish.
In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes a language harder to learn, cf. English.
Interesting point. I wonder to what extent that would continue to be the case if words were regularized (with respect to conjugation and plurals, as well as with respect to spelling).
Strangely, I don't notice non-native speakers of English making spelling errors all that often.
Instead I notice them making the same grammatical errors over and over again. For instance Chinese speakers frequently mangle English plurals and omit articles "a" and "the".
So I think the hardest part of learning any language is always the grammar rather than the words, if the grammar differs from your native grammar. It's easy to map "aeroplane" to "avion" but much harder to map "the" to "le/la/l'/les/las" depending on context.
I think the hardest part of learning any language is always the grammar rather than the words, if the grammar differs from your native grammar.
That fits my experience as a foreign-language teacher (Chinese to native speakers of English, English to native speakers of various Sinitic languages and to speakers of Japanese, Biblical Hebrew in the medium of Modern Standard Chinese to Taiwanese persons of varying native languages, including one non-Sinitic native language). The categories that are hardest to notice in the acquired language are the categories that don't even exist in the speaker's native language. (For example, Chinese has neither number for nouns nor tense for verbs, nor does it have indefinite or definite articles, so native speakers of Chinese regularly confuse those issues in English.) This is especially so when the grammatical features are marked by phonological features that don't exist in the first language. Chinese does not have syllable-final consonant clusters, so a Chinese speaker's ear is not practiced in hearing those in other languages. So the difference between "fix" (present tense) and "fixed" past tense can be missed on TWO levels by a native speaker of Chinese learning English, as can the difference between "sixth" (singular) and "sixths" (plural).
Americans, of course, make a huge number of grammar mistakes when speaking Chinese, and rarely notice themselves doing so.
