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Indeed. English is as dominant in the world as it is today probably because England and the USA have (or had) plenty of shallow coal, iron, and (relevant after
by grozzle 5y ago
Indeed. English is as dominant in the world as it is today probably because England and the USA have (or had) plenty of shallow coal, iron, and (relevant after the "special relationship") oil deposits, not because of any particular linguistic efficiency.
- bmmayer1 5y agoIraq has even more oil deposits. Why doesn't the world speak Arabic?
- grozzle 5y agoToo late to the party with just that resource. Engines that most efficiently use oil came about only after the era of history when engines that need coal were dominant. Fun bit of alt-history pondering - China was the most powerful single nation on Earth at the time of the dawn of the industrial revolution - it's quite plausible that they missed out on that lead just because of a couple of shallow whitewater sections of the Yangtze river that made bringing their coal by barge to the coastal cities impractical.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoNo, they missed out on it because of bureaucratic stupidity. There was a Chinese industrial revolution in, IIRC, the 1100s and/or 1200s. They were producing something on the order of 100,000 tons of iron a year, with the whole industrial revolution "using the outputs to improve the efficiency" cycle starting to happen. And then the bureaucrats shut it down, because "the wrong kind of people" were getting rich from it. They could have owned the world. They could have been the ones with the technological and manufacturing dominance. And instead they threw it away to keep their society stratified in the way they thought it should be. The Chinese "century of humiliation" was caused by that decision back in the 1200s.