...he had to learn French and German well enough to read
I'd like to stress that he needed French *and* German meaning that in any field of activity dominating lingua franca (or lingua anglica ) is not the only foreign language that one will need to know in order to really profess that field.
Even in computer sciences & engineering where lingua anglica is undisputable dominator in some (not so rare) cases one should beg Google Translate to assist in grasping some article or forum posting made in Spanish, German, French… (to name a few)
On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 2:53 PM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/7/10 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
So, even a discipline with a lot of polyglots can't work without lingua franca.
I remember reading in Isaac Asimov's autobiography how, as a chemist in the 1940s, he had to learn French and German well enough to read papers in those languages. So the lingua franca in a field varies with time as well as field.
- d.
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