Epistemic Modality in English and French. Linguistic Approach

Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, once predicted that there would be no need for more than just a handful of computers. That the reader of this book is probably reading these lines not on a screen but in the pages of that anachronistic device, the book, would seem quite an aberration to certain pundits of the БЂњdigital revolution.БЂ«That you are reading them in archaic, messy, and inconsistent English, French, or Swahili, instead of in Esperanto, defies the predictions of half a century ago that the world would soon be communicating in a logical, unambiguous, and Platonically designed lingua franca. Likewise, we are not spending long weekends in space stations as was universally predicted three decades ago. In an example of corporate arrogance, after the first moon landing the now-defunct airline Pan Am took advance bookings for round-trips between earth and the moon. Nice prediction, except that the company failed to forsee that it would be out of business not long after. A Solution Waiting for a Problem Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools, not to induce nature to yield its secrets ...»