Although there’s been some press about how inhospitable to tourists Beijing will be during the Olympics, this video, in complete saccharine madness, argues otherwise.

Since we’re taking a trip to Beijing in about a month, it was cool to see all the sites in this video (Apparently all the singers are famous people too. Did you see Jackie Chan?). But I also laughed at several parts, just because the song is so long and there are so many huge smiles in it and there are, like, several beautiful women telling me their doors are always open…it just got kind of silly.

But when I looked at the comments, everyone was taking the video totally seriously!

When I pointed out what I thought was one of the funniest quotes to Jewel, our resident Mandarin speaker, she was able to explain why I thought the video was funny even though it’s not supposed to be. Here’s the line:

The flowing enchantment and charms are filled with youthful spirit and vitality.

Apparently, that’s relatively normal speech in China. While in recent decades the English style has become as concise as possible, Chinese writers (and weird promotional video makers) embrace flowery language.

This gives me even more reason to learn Mandarin. When I first started writing I was drawn to the flowery style. Now I like being economical with words, but it took some getting used to. Maybe I find my way back to the sinuous delights of language wrought with sonorous hues, or something like that.

But anyway, I suppose the tendency to be over the top with language might help explain this highly exuberant video. I can’t wait to get over there and see the enthusiasm first hand. I want to learn the “Beijing welcomes you” part and sing it to people when they ask how I like the city.

I gotta say, the Freakonomics commenters are definitely some of the sharpest on the Net. A lot of the responses to the quorum on globalization and Language that we got to participate in were as interesting as the official post! Here are some things I learned from the 80-some posts that are up so far.

Even though as John mentioned in his contribution to the post, there isn’t a country that has volunteered to change its language to English for economic reasons, a commenter named Ari Fromm says there’s an industry that has done so.

English is currently mandatory for ALL air traffic control worldwide. That’s a pretty strong indication of what the universal language of the world is……

It’s clear that with the rise of English, multi-lingualism is on the rise as well. But what’s the most bilingual continent? According to a commenter named Bjog, it’s Africa, which makes sense when you think about it.

Every African is minimally bilingual–more than any other people on the planet. Every African speaks their native language, the language of nearby ethnic communities, plus the language in which their country was colonized–any of the Europhone languages.

The Koreans are hedging their bets when it comes global super powers. Alan says:

…note that there are 100,000 Korean students at Chinese universities and 100,000 Korean students at American universites.

Finally, people seem really preoccupied with this notion that English is going to morph and change into pidgin or creole English. Probably half the posts on the quorum are about this idea. It seems intuitive and it’s not new to us, but a commenter named Neil Wilson has a suggestion to the contrary.

Look at the written word. It seems to me that there were far more changes to the English language between Jefferson’s words in 1776 and Lincoln’s words in 1863 than between Lincoln and Obama. This is true even though it has been 7 score and 4 years (It hasn’t been 5 years yet.)

English is far more stable today than it ever has been.

Thou art quite right, sir. ‘Tis sooth that our English tongue hath been a changling historickly.

Though were English to change as rapidly as everyone suspects, would the result be horrible and Orwellian? A commenter named Ramon Cashon says, “Yes!”

Think of the users’ manual of a Japanese or Chinese product and apply that to the spoken word. THAT is the English language that will gain dominance… if you can still call it a language at that stage.

At least information about any language is available now. It didn’t occur me to that it’s easier to pick up a local tongue of another locality than ever before until this comment from Tieler:

You can’t go to your local library or bookstore and buy books on Kurdish, but go online and there is a wealth of resources for grammar, vocabulary, online dictionaries, and so on.

All in all, it’s great to see how much interest there is in this topic. And I can’t wait to see if I’m speaking pidgin, Mandarin or the Queen’s English in five years.

As I was combing the site for funny nuggets to include in the latest edition of Best Comments, I noticed something interesting in the discussion of our lesson on drunk performers.

When I read that, I thought, “Oh wow, that’s funny. How embarrassing.” Then I felt real bad.

Hey, I didn’t know the singer died. Wow. I couldn’t find anything about this anywhere on the Internet so I asked Jewel, the only member of the Ebaby! team who knows Chinese, if she knew anything about the singer who drunkenly fell to his death from a stage.

There’s a whole Chinese Wikipedia page about the incident, but Jewel says that this bit from the singer’s page pretty much sums it up:

While filming a gameshow for Fuji Television in Japan on June 24, 1993, Wong Ka-Kui fell off a 3 meter platform head first, and was hospitalized immediately. He died after spending several days in coma due to internal bleeding of head injuries.

What a bummer. Jewel couldn’t find anything confirming that he was drunk, but since two members brought it up it seems to be widely believed.

Interestingly, another Chinese member was reminded of the recent “fall” of another celebrity by the same English lesson.

This one has an English Wikipedia page. Basically, a very famous actor named Edison Chen took his laptop in to get it fixed. One of the techs grabbed the hundreds of photos in the computer’s hard drive, which included nude shots of Chen and 14 female celebrities.

In the US, this is the kind of thing that launches you into super stardom (see Paris Hilton), but following the scandal, Chen announced he will leave show biz.

I think he should just move to the US. C’mon, Edison, I’ll give you English lessons in exchange for dating tips. You’ll be a stateside star in no time.