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My grandfather never had a formal education and I've seen old articles of his with citations in three different languages. That was in the early 1900s. In the e

by knolax 6y ago

My grandfather never had a formal education and I've seen old articles of his with citations in three different languages. That was in the early 1900s. In the early 2000s the majority of my high school classmates were trilingual and most of the world is already multilingual[0]. So I don't think 4-5 languages is a big difference from the current status quo. Plus, you know, since it's a Romanian company you could all just learn Romanian in addition to the 2-3 languages you already know. Instead of only interacting with other cosmopolitans IT monkeys you could go interact with the locals and/or upper management for once. The local Romanian teenagers could get programming internships without having to learn English too. If fry-cooks can learn Spanish you can learn Romanian. Who knows how many potential Linus Torvalds are out there working menial jobs in rural Finland because they failed English in high school. [0] https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/multilingualism https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/multilingualism

tsimionescu 6y ago
I am Romanian, so I can speak it pretty well, and I am trilingual myself (though my French is pretty weak). The colleagues I was speaking of do not live in Romania though, and the Romanian company is just a subsidiary of a US company. All of the people I was speaking of live in their respective countries (the US, Germany, India, China, Italy). This is what I was getting at - if we have international trade and cooperation, we need a language to communicate across borders. Whether that is English or French or Mandarin is not the point, but that there must be 1 language that all of the people who want to participate in the conversation understand. And while in work conditions some amount of multilingualism could be required, there are other venues like trade conferences where trying to handle people speaking tens or hundreds of languages would quickly become untenable for all but the greatest polyglot. And Linus Torvalds is a great example. In a world without a lingua franca for IT, how could a Finnish student learn from and debate an American professor? Papers could be translated, but how would interactive discussion happen? Would Tannenbaum have learned Finnish or payed a Finnish translator if Torvalds hadn't known English?

by knolax 6y ago

tsimionescu 6y ago

I am Romanian, so I can speak it pretty well, and I am trilingual myself (though my French is pretty weak). The colleagues I was speaking of do not live in Romania though, and the Romanian company is just a subsidiary of a US company. All of the people I was speaking of live in their respective countries (the US, Germany, India, China, Italy). This is what I was getting at - if we have international trade and cooperation, we need a language to communicate across borders. Whether that is English or French or Mandarin is not the point, but that there must be 1 language that all of the people who want to participate in the conversation understand. And while in work conditions some amount of multilingualism could be required, there are other venues like trade conferences where trying to handle people speaking tens or hundreds of languages would quickly become untenable for all but the greatest polyglot. And Linus Torvalds is a great example. In a world without a lingua franca for IT, how could a Finnish student learn from and debate an American professor? Papers could be translated, but how would interactive discussion happen? Would Tannenbaum have learned Finnish or payed a Finnish translator if Torvalds hadn't known English?