Re: Futility of auxlangs (was Re: Aesthetics)

In a message dated 10/23/2007 10:47:57 AM Central Daylight Time,
joerg_rhiemeier@WEB.DE writes:


>  I remember a prediction made some time in the
> 1990s that by 2007, Chinese will overtake English in the Internet,
> but that did not happen.  It failed to take into account that English
> is widely learned by non-native speakers, while Chinese is not.  The
> Chinese learn English rather than treating foreigners to learn their
> language.  Similar predictions were made about the future role of
> Japanese in the 1970s - they failed to come true for the same reason.
>
Machine translation is also coming into its own.  Who needs an auxlang when
everyone can get a translation?  Spoken, face-to-face interpretation is taking
longer, but I predict that English will be the last auxlang, and even it will
not last much longer in that role.

stevo   </HTML>

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