Re: Planet of the New Papers

[Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>]

David Marjanovic writes:
 > > who knows, in another few decades, we could be arguing about
 > > whether French, German, or Spanish should be the universal
 > > communication language.
 > 
 > In those few cases where the EU uses a single language (I can only
 > think of the European Central Bank), that's English...

It happens that in my day-job I am from time to time involved in
large-scale collaborative software projects funded and supervised by
the European Commission.  In the most recent of these, the partners
were from Finland, France (three partners), Switzerland, Sweden,
Denmark (two partners), Spain, Slovenia and China (unfunded).  No
partner organisation from the UK (I work for one of the Danish
companies).  In all the meetings, the only language spoken was
... anyone?  Yep.  English.

And that's been true of every single similar collaborative European
project I've been involved in.  It's just not an open issue.

(I'm not saying that this is a good thing or a bad thing, just that
it's true.)

 _/|_    ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor    <mike@indexdata.com>    http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "I have the uneasy feeling that if Spielberg had made 'Close
         Encounters' today, we would have seen the aliens in the first ten
         minutes, and by the halfway mark they'd be attacking Manhattan
         with death rays" -- Roger Ebert.