Well, it is great we have a common language which facilitates scientific communication, I don't really understand why the author seems so apologetic about that.

Well, it is great we have a common language which facilitates scientific communication, I don't really understand why the author seems so apologetic about that. 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...