was always interested in languages and different cultures, so I
learned some Russian, French and Chinese along the way. In late 1995, I
created on the web 'The Languages of the World by Computers and the
Internet' and tried to summarize there the brief history, linguistic
and phonetic features, writing system and computer processing aspects
for each of the six major languages of the world, in English and
Japanese. As I gained more experience, I invited my two associates to
help me write a book on viewing, understanding and creating
multilingual webpages, which was published in August 1997 as 'The
Multilingual Web Guide', in a Japanese edition, the world's first book
on such a subject."

Yoshi added in the same email interview: "Thousands of years ago, in
Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more concerned about
communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one language, but in
several. In our modern world, most nation states have each adopted one
language for their own use. I predict greater use of different
languages and multilingual pages on the internet, not a simple
gravitation to American English, and also more creative use of
multilingual computer translation. 99% of the websites created in Japan
are written in Japanese."

Robert Ware launched his website OneLook Dictionaries in April 1996 as
a "fast finder" in hundreds of online dictionaries. On September 2,
1998, the fast finder could "browse" 2,058,544 words in 425
dictionaries covering various topics: business, computer/internet,
medical, miscellaneous, religion, science, sports, technology, general,
and slang. OneLook Dictionaries was provided as a free service by the
company Study Technologies, in Englewood, Colorado.

Robert Ware explained in September 1998: "On the personal side, I was
almost entirely in contact with people who spoke one language and did
not have much incentive to expand language abilities. Being in contact
with the entire world has a way of changing that. And changing it for
the better! (...) I have been slow to start including non-English
dictionaries (partly because I am monolingual). But you will now find a
few included."

In the same email interview, Robert wrote about a personal experience
showing the internet could promote both a common language and
multilingualism: "In 1994, I was working for a college and trying to
install a software package on a particular type of computer. I located
a person who was working on the s