On 12/04/2021 11:51, Spike wrote:
On 12/04/2021 10:22, Robin wrote:

I wonder if Hull and other universities have consulted potential
employers here and abroad. With English now the language of business as
well as science graduates from Hull might be at a disadvantage in the
jobs market compared with those from China, India etc who can spell and
write clearly.

Some 50 years ago a young Danish aeronautical engineer came to visit our
lab to discuss a problem of mutual interest, and attend the same
conference in London that we were going to. After the conference was
over we took him along to a pub. During the course of the evening I
commented that his English was very good. He put this down to the best
technical and scientific books and journals being written in English,
and if you wanted to progress you had to learn the language so they
could be read and understood.

If British universities are going to turn out educated scientists and
engineers that are otherwise semi-illiterate, then the source of leading
information will shift elsewhere and the country will sink that much lower.

My bilingual nephew says that Kant is easier to read in English than the
German in which it was written..

I think English is a wonderful mix of Romance and Germanic languages and
has benefited mightily from cultural appropriation.

Pig (Nordic) Swine(Germanic) and Pork (Romance/French) shows us the real
value of being able to say the same thing in a common vulgar way, and
unpleasant way, and a upper class Norman, toff, sort of way..

And where would we be without our bungalows and boomerangs?


--
€œIt is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established
authorities are wrong.€�

ۥ Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV