Re: To all cocoa developers - new cocoa dev forum
Re: To all cocoa developers - new cocoa dev forum
- Subject: Re: To all cocoa developers - new cocoa dev forum
- From: Ondra Cada <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2002 13:59:37 +0100
On Friday, November 8, 2002, at 11:52 , Marco Binder wrote:
Although Ondra: at least at the moment, you'll have to admit, that German
is definitly a more important language than Czech simply because there
are around 100 Million people in Europe talking German...
So what? There's a few milliards (billions for our U.S. friends) of those
talking Chinese (well, writing Chinese -- they don't talk the same ;)),
which does not make the language any more important than, say, Frisian.
Gosh, I still can speak Russian (we all were forced to learn the thing) --
despite the vast number of people talking the language, guess what good it
brings: I've even found that Pushkin or Lermontov are better to be read in
a good translation than in original! (I've translated them myself, in case
it might look as I don't know the originals well.)
Don't take me wrong, there is no inherent quality in English(*) which
other languages lack; it is just that it currenly is the real Esperanto.
Myself, I would like Latin were still in that position; it is not though,
and that's that. And it would be definitely good to learn German (which I
regrettably did not) to be able to read Goethe or Mann (and a plethora of
others); so far as *communication* goes though, any decent German knows
English, just like anyone other in the today's world. The very same way
you might consider learning Czech to read Seifert or Capek (and a plethora
of others -- heck, even Havel used to write nice things before he lost his
sense completely), but there would be *ABSOLUTELY* no point in that if you
did it for the sake of communicating with Czechs: those who are worth
speaking to know English anyway.
(*) Actually there is: English being a very successul blend of two quite
old language branches, it inherits, so to speak, twice the wealth other
languages do. Had we Czechs had any sense, we might have done the same
with our language and German a hundred-odd years ago; alas, we instead
stupidly (tried to) cut out any track of German from Czech... Well, I
guess we are beginning to be quite offtopic here ;)
---
Ondra Hada
OCSoftware: email@hidden
http://www.ocs.cz
private email@hidden
http://www.ocs.cz/oc
_______________________________________________
cocoa-dev mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.