On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 7:30 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum
<iljitsch(_at_)muada(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 11 Mar 2014, at 18:45, Christopher LILJENSTOLPE
<cdl_forward(_at_)cdl(_dot_)asgaard(_dot_)org> wrote:
I don't think the IETF can afford to enfeeble itself by excluding colleagues
and collaborators who do not have a fluent grasp of English (native tongue
or not).
Hm, learning English is not that hard.
Hmm... Speaking as a non-native speaker, I somehow disagree with this.
It strongly depends on the level of fluency you require. My
personal experience is that in order to learn any language with a good
degree of fluency (so that you can collaborate with others) you need
to spend at least 6-12 months in a country where the language is
spoken. Before going to US for my last year of PhD, I was quite good
in reading English (especially technical English), quite bad in
writing it and hopeless for speaking it.
Said that, we should observe that in the specific case at hand, I
expect the probability that someone has good proficiency in English,
conditioned by the fact that s/he is an IETFer, quite large.
The two main things are that it's easy to learn and easy to speak.
I am fascinated by languages and I am studying few of them (French,
Greek, Hebrew and Arabic) in my free time. The impression that I got
is that the effort to achieve good fluency does not depend much on the
specific language (Disclaimer: I never tried oriental languages such
Chinese or Japanese, nor more exotic things). Sure, some languages
can have some specific difficulties such as different alphabets,
unwritten vowels or a rich morphology (as the verbs in Italian or
French), but it is something that you can overcome easily with a bit
of exercise. However, after the first step (high or low), there is
still a long road to good proficiency...
...and about "easy to speak"... Let's just say that English is not
the best example with its anarchic pronunciation... :-) :-) :-)
Said that, I would stick to English. It is the "best" (in an
engineering sense :-) solution.
Riccardo