Thats another thing! Many of the Others out there in our World Know our own English! While so Few of Us, -Know much Any of *Their's*! Ditto for our Respective Cultures!...We may also someday find ourselves Really Flatfooted!, -without a Linguistic Paddle!

I want to know when the computer guru's are going to make the "Star Trek" Universal Translator, a reality!

Yeah!, -It was Good that the Gorn and Kirk were at least able to Talk with one another!...

They have it on a limited scale. At a Law Enforcement expo they were showing it off. You speak the phase and it will translate it into the language you choose. It is of course limited to general LE phrases and only a couple of languages right now, but they are working on it.

And accents and speech impediments supposedly mess it up worse than they did voice dictation software a couple years ago.

I think by a universal translator, wildman was talking about a computer system that could assign known values to unknown works, grammer and semantics. Hate to say this in front of my computer, but computers are stupid. "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra." Until they can find a fully functional telepath and can successfully clone them with their paranormal talents being duplicatable, AND put the brains of these clones into a fishbowl and wire it up to a motherboard, I don't think we'll ever be able to do that. We'll have to use pictoral math, certain tables of constants and the periodic table to start, along with a LOT of play acting.

From an IT perspective, I would want to learn Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, German, Afrikaans, French, Arabic, Russian, and Spanish, in that order or priority.

From a more economical perspective, I would learn Japanese, Arabic, Mandarin, German, Spanish, Korean, Russian, and French, in that order of priority.

From a world traveler perspective, I would learn Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Mandarin, and Arabic, in that order of priority.