From: Howard C. Berkowitz (hcb@gettcomm.com)
Date: Tue Mar 23 2004 - 16:40:46 GMT-3
At 7:27 PM +0100 3/23/04, SANCHEZ-MONGE,ANTONIO (HP-France,ex2) wrote:
>Well, good English skills are not needed everywhere. They are in the US, UK
>and Australia, but I know many examples of people with very respectable jobs
>(is Prime Minister a respectable job?) who do not speak a word of English.
Doesn't that depend on the Prime Minister?
>We live in a multicultural, "multilingual" world.
>
>Vale?
>
>;)
Ah, so desu ka.
Ach, so.
Mea culpa.
Point taken.
It is a reality, however, that the bulk of networking literature is
in English, so a reading knowledge is a practical necessity. I
studied, not well, Latin and German, and neither was terribly useful.
The only technical paper I ever really needed to read, which was in a
Swiss journal of biochemistry, was in French. With dictionary in
hand, given I was mostly working with chemical names, I was able to
extract enough to repeat an experiment -- at least, nothing exploded
(well, there was one flash fire, but that was my fault),
For some unfathomable reason, I seem to pick up spoken Japanese well
enough to order dinner and shop, and at least decently pronounce
memorized things. My Scandinavian colleagues tell me that I have a
basically charming ability to try to speak Svensk to the Danes and
Dansk to the Swedes. I know enough words of Krio to know when my
Sierra Leonean friends are telling a proverb, and to help out in the
kitchen.
On a routine basis, I really wish I spoke Spanish, as it's common
enough around me.
Seriously, depending on what you want to do in networking, there can
be practical considerations. As far as networking professional
organizations, the ITU's official languages are French and English.
The IETF is in English. Simply because it's common to pretty much
everyone, the discussions at RIPE, the European networking forum are
in English, as are the Asia-Pacific APRICOT meetngs. LACNIC, the
Latin American and Caribbean address registry, uses Spanish, English,
and some Portuguese.
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