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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (64061)	5/22/2005 2:34:42 AM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Respond to of 74559

Lizzie, I had to do a study about 6 mos ago about whether it was cost effective for a UK company to do business in Quebec It's all been done before. Most of that stuff was in English and all the entrenched companies had to get their documentation etc into French.... I can see it being intimidating for a foreign company but I would imagine hooking up with an established Quebec company would/could solve the problem (pretty standard). Of course number 2 is correct for now but for how long is the more pressing question... BTW I hail from Montreal originally and it was not cheap always to Francisize (sp?) but neither was it the end of the world ... documentation etc is in French... why not ? the programming languages do not change... Good coding and tools actually make it not much of problem but some with a lot of hard coding were brutalized. Customers paying for bad programming... The example of kludge... not the word usually used much at the customer level except maybe with an IT guy.. :O) And yeah Francophone programmers use a lot of English jargon but much also of their own... regards Kastel

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (64061)	5/22/2005 3:25:06 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Lizzie, I think English is winning hands down. internetworldstats.com English wins: 1 - In cyberspace total numbers. 2 - In $ value per user x number of users 3 - In total world population usage [if Mandarin and Cantonese are considered separate languages, and only just comes second to Chinese if Mandarin and Cantonese are combined]. 4 - In spread around the world [Chinese is highly concentrated in China]. 5 - In ease of usage English beats Chinese, despite crazy English exceptions and inconsistencies. Kanji/Chinese hieroglyphs are not a lot of fun. Japan did a kludge with hiragana and katakana to help ease the way, and China did a simplification during the cultural revolution or about then. Apparently, using pinyin, people can learn to enter characters quickly in Chinese. It would be nice to see the equivalent of metrication of English to make it rational, consistent etc. American has changed colour to color and made other changes, but of a trivial nature. Maybe there will be a huge cultural shift in a decade or so, led by revolutionary young people who refuse to just go along with old-geezer style English, or American. That will be TeoTwawki. That would be a LOT of fun. Hindi is a big language, but not strong in cyberspace so isn't mentioned in that list. I suppose Russian is quite big too, but just another also-ran in the grand scheme of things. World languages by distribution ethnologue.com Mqurice