*BSD News Article 9129


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Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!spool.mu.edu!uunet!mcsun!ub4b!inftec.be!mike
From: mike@inftec.be (Mike Aerts)
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
Message-ID: <1992Dec19.132545.2241@inftec.be>
Keywords: Han Kanji Katakana Hirugana ISO10646 Unicode Codepages
Organization: Information Technologies, Wemmel, Belgium.
References: <mathias.724467456@sune.stacken.kth.se> <id.M2XV.VTA@ferranti.com> <1992Dec18.043033.14254@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 92 13:25:45 GMT
Lines: 27

In article <1992Dec18.043033.14254@midway.uchicago.edu> goer@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>One of the big criticism leveled at US Engineers is that they are either
>too dumb or lazy to build into their software support for non-Western
I think a good programmer is lazy by definition :-)
>
>Incidentally, although it's true that US Engineers often have really
>terrible language skills, this is due more to geographical isolation
>than to organic stupidity.  There's just no need for multilingualism
>here in the states, the way there is in Europe, esp. in the low coun-
>tries and Scandinavia.
I'm from the low countries and hate those stupid signs on top of those
letters, if you need to remember these for different languages it's
a pain in the ass, but wait until you see some Vietnamese they are 
the champions I think.
I think we ( the Belgians ) are champions too, we have 3 official
languages for 10M people.
I don't think it's a matter of isolation but size, the language
skills of my French and German neighbors are IMHO not that impressive
too.

mike.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
E-mail : mike@inftec.BE     | I think that it's extraordinarly important
tel    : +32 2 460.46.11    | that we in computer science keep fun in
Fax    : +32 2 460.56.50    | computing. ....               A.J. Perlis