I always thought the same thing! I only found this out relatively recently, and I thought it was pretty cool
I always thought the same thing! I only found this out relatively recently, and I thought it was pretty cool
Interestingly, while French was the lingua franca of Europe for several hundred years, it wasn’t the origin of the term ‘Lingua Franca’.
That term meant the “language of the Franks” and was the Mediterranean trade language in the medieval through Renaissance eras. It was actually a pidgin of Italian, French, Greek and Arabic adopted as being roughly mutually intelligible among Venetians, Byzantines and North Africans.
The reference to the ‘Franks’ is because the generic word for a western European (in the Byzantine, Greek world) had long been “Frank”.
Earlier in my career I probably would have. These days I’m an executive… I have a lot more of a choice about where I work, and a big part of my job is representing the corporation and motivating a lot of folks to work hard together to get its mission accomplished.
I don’t think I could do that for a company that I thought was harmful or immoral, and I know I wouldn’t want to.