English and Its Undeserved Good Luck

If an historian who happens to be from Egypt describes the governmental system at the time of the pyramids were built, would we expect them disavow the ancient regime? Even if they were describing the system under Nasser, a disavowal would be weird.

I question the need to preserve a language if it inhibits the positive spread of information. Why should a country hold on to their traditional language if it holds back the potential of its citizens?

I would argue that the decentralized and weak arbitration of correctness is what allows it to thrive in extremely diverse cultures, as there is no concept of authoritative correctness that requires you to use a construct that is cultural in nature.

Personally, I think English is an easier language than German so I'm glad that German didn't win. It's sad though that Esperanto or one of the other artificial languages isn't more popular.

It seems fairly obvious to me that English and the dominance of the British Empire in the 19th century followed by the rise of the USA as a superpower in the 20th century just happened to coincide with the rise of globalisations in the 20th century. It could've easily been any of the other previous imperialist super powers (Spain, France, etc), but those empires just so happen to have declined in power before globalisation.

So in short, luck.

I mean, not "would be a good one"... deserves?

(I'm sure many people would cite some beautiful language as a "good one", but remember that in the process of becoming the "world language" it would cease to be "beautiful" anyhow.)

Maybe English is were it is at because it adapts more quickly than other languages and with that English has changed much as a language over time and still does.

No it wasn't. Being an island nation and having both invaded and suffered invasions during medieval times, Britain understood that sea power was key to its security and invested heavily in naval power - as you'd expect an island nation to do if it had the resources. This doesn't mean just investment in boats and personnel, but in things like accurate clocks to aid navigation. The government of the day offered huge cash prizes to anyone who could make a chronometer that would reliably work at sea and technologists rose to the challenge.

Britain did indeed benefit from a variety of other technological developments, but they basically deployed their blue water navy and colonial efforts in much the same way that the Romans did in the Mediterranean sea centuries before - and the success of Roman and Hellenic civilizations is easily observed in the ubiquity of Latin and Greek roots in the variety of European languages, and our ongoing use of the Latin alphabet. If the Roman empire had not collapsed in the 4th century (for reasons which are beyond the scope of this discussion) most of the world would be speaking Latin today. As with English, Latin thrived because the Romans were fairly skilled administrators of the territories they took over, prioritizing trade and economic growth rather than conquest and total destruction/

Latin and Greek are distinctive languages because they have a fully phonetic alphabet, whereas many other writing systems struggle with notating foreign languages. Ancient Hebrew, for example, derived from Phoenician writing and is based on the writing of consonant sounds and so it retains a strong oral tradition of Torah study because there are no letters for vowels and so the meaning of a given word in Hebrew depends heavily on context, substantially limiting its use by others lacking that oral tradition. The utility of an easy-to-learn alphabet should not be underestimated; look at the time cost involved in developing an adequate vocabulary in Chinese or some other ideogrammatic language. Japanese uses Chinese symbols as kanji (albeit with different meanings from Chinese, though Japanese schoolchildren learn both meanings) and has not one but two phonetic scripts, one for Japanese words (to help kids look up kanji in syllabic dictionaries) and one for foreign words. Oddly, though, Japan doesn't have a punning tradition based on homophony because the syllabic script came along much later.

I apologize for the extreme over-simplifications above, but this is really a book-length topic that can't be properly argued in only a few paragraphs.

Conversely, the fact that the standard is a language where some nations inherently have an advantage over the rest of the world is an unfortunate side-effect of historical events. I also don't see the advantages leveling at any point in the future unless a country were to decide to completely give up its entire cultural heritage, literature, etc. and adopt English in every aspect of public life - and even then it would take minimally a generation before most of the new culture was assimilated, and would only level the field for said country.

Also I think there are two distinctions that need to be made. The first is that there is a global lingua franca, namely English. Now the world has a new standard language instead of French in which to communicate about everything. I see this as a great win in the sense that we can all communicate with one another, the only negative part is that its not a level playing field, but this again is simply a discomfort, it was the same before when French and Latin were lingua francas.

The second is the anglicisation of all cultures. Here in continental Europe you can almost literally observe the change as you see how many advertisements, marketing, technology, language, music, films etc. are directly imported from the English speaking world, even to the point where it now "sounds wierd" to use non-English words for certain things. Now you could see this as positive or negative. For one if you go anywhere you know what to expect, you have a universal culture to understand marketing, tech, restaurants, ads, doctors, educational systems, etc.. Of course on the flipside everywhere is the same, just as in the US you can travel thousands of miles and the stores, language, and restaurants are all the same. So you are getting sameness on a global scale. I see how the author could be sad about that happening and I think thats what's making him so apologetic. I even sympathize with him, English is great to communicate globally but I don't see why it and its countries' cultures have to encroach on all others, it seems to make the world a dimmer place.

I've often wondered why we haven't created a language based off of knowledge gleaned from the cognitive sciences and universal grammar and phonology, to create a language that was perfectly regular and maximally easy to learn (orthography/phonology/syntax/semantics) for all speakers of any language. Its certainly possible, you could even make it much more efficient for text-processing and analysis purposes. You could likely cut down the time of acquisition to less than 6 months for B2 level fluency. Of course all previous attempts at synthetic languages tell us no one will use it. I wonder how easy it would have to be to cross the threshold? Probably impossibly easy given the number of rules required to generate an infinite set of discreet symbols...