> Here's the riddle though. English has become the dominant language in both Science and Computing nowadays. So much so, that I can't imagine a present-day professional scientist or software engineer surviving without a decent command of English -- interested to hear from LanX or other European monks on this topic BTW.

I qualify as European Monk being Eatalian :) yes English skill is a must-have: when my son was following the programming course at university (a Python course..) I told him: "look at this book: it will be the last one you read in Eatalian".

Infact I cannot even imagine a system or network administrator or a programmer ignorning English.. even if I recall LanX asking for perl books in German..

Even if I never studied English, nowadays I dont remeber if I have read a tech paper in English or in Italian.

The whole story could have been different if Olivetti had succes, but, the history is written by winners :) so now everything in the tech world is in English.

The real trouble is that English is a heap of exceptions (at least as seen from a Latin native point of view) and has an incredible proliferation of words because it is spoken in so many countries. This will slow the progress of AI developping because it must to be Arificial Very Intelligent to understand English.

So English will probably transform into something different, as I say, into Samplish, a language that finally can be teached to everyone if you thinked and buyed a Samplish course; the mouton will be treated as pecora and banned: only sheep will survive.

Another side of the story is interesting to tell: how tech English modifies other languages.

French monks will pardon me but I always laugh to ordinateur and fichier instead of computer and file: the french resistence is worth as the Maginot Line.

In the opposite side we can look at Eatalian, that always used to be a sponge language: we already have implementare from to implement (and it ironically comes from Latin implere ) as new verb and many others like restartare from to restart and triggherato from triggered and so on.. Even worst: our managers studied on English books, so they use customer satisfaction instead of the Eatalian form and everything they can spit: once I counted 14 English words and phrases in a 4 lines email from a collegue.. go figure.. I replied using as many Latin mottos I was able to fit in the response. Yes I'm evil sometimes :)

So in your sci-fata future :) we will speak Samplish, Shakespeare resting in peace.

L*