Hello Henri,

On Wednesday May 29 2019 23:00, you wrote to me:

 HD> Hello Michiel,

 MvdV>> "All speaking the same language"? You really live in a bubble.
 MvdV>> The assumption that everyone in Fidonet speaks English is simply
 MvdV>> wrong.

[..]

 HD> You forget France.

We were discussing the "Family of Fidonet". Tha last French node left Fidonet
ages ago. Same for Wallonia. Nol longer present in Fidonet.  Alas.

 MvdV>> No, we may be one big family, or at least I'd would like it to
 MvdV>> be, but the assertion that we all speak the same language is
 MvdV>> plain wrong.

 HD> That may be, but someone at the TV has explained why in the long run
 HD> the differences in languages will go away.

"Someone at the TV"... Someone on TV said it, so it must be true? Oh, c'mon..

 HD> You already see it at universities here in The Netherlands. Many
 HD> studies are only available in Englisch, not even in Dutch any more.

Be that as it may be. The Dutch language won't go away juat like that. And
neither will Frisian, Suid Afrikaans or any of the hundreds of languages that
are native to less than 25 million people.

We are a VERY long way from one world language and if it ever comes to that, it
may not or even probably will not be English.

 HD> Even for the Master Study of Dutch, there is a significant declining
 HD> in students. Some weeks ago someone warned us for that. The same will
 HD> happen in Friesland in future. Learning a local language only a small
 HD> part speaks, is a kind of waste of energy.

I agree. Here in Fidonet I am often told: "if we had not... You would be
speaking German|Russian." I doubt that is true, but even if it were, they did
not do me a favour. I am not at all happy to be saddled with a native language
that is understood by at best 1% of the world population and spoken by even
less. But that is how it is. The twor of Bable is not going away in mt
lifetime.

 HD> In the same time you could study Englisch, German, Spanisch or French
 HD> to widen your horizon. You do the same to commnucate with many
 HD> Russians. There are also Russians who write perfectly Englisch, even
 HD> if it is not their native language.

Yes, there are those. But they are a minority.


Cheers, Michiel

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