Unstructured, draft outlines and chapters of a book trying to unveil what does that question mean, why we can ask it, who can act upon it, and possible answers
Whatever process we focus on to achieve a “global ideology” would be far from any given form of that ideology. However, as we have seen, a “global vision” already exists in certain technical areas. These areas can be seen that as having reached de facto global standardisation. Other process might follow the technical dynamics, we shall investigate what, and how, other aspects of what it means to be a human can reach global ideals.
Similarly with languages, and the primordial diversity that we illustrated when talking about first encounters between diverse human groups, historically the differences between human populations have been enormous, testing the limits of what it means to be human.
Cultural groups have organised themselves in a wide variety of ways, from the way unions are made, kids are raised, division of labour constructed, ways of seeking food and refuge, medicine, artistic expressions, ways of keeping the group knowledge, religious visions and practices… Almost every aspect of what characterises to be human has experienced an explosion in diversity, with the only commonalities being that these aspects are shared by virtually all human populations. Reproduction, food, shelter, language, body modification/ornamentation, artistic and spiritual expressions, being probably the main ones.
Humans also seem to share multiple universal –or quasi-universal– characteristics. As we have seen, these are the smiles and laughter, pointing towards things, the taboo of reproducing with your mother or your son, a division of labour based on gender, food based taboos, religious beliefs and afterlife, a cosmovision, oral traditions and stories, rituals, music and arts, ethnobotanic knowledge, modification of the environment, humour and the use of technologies such as fire, spears, hammers, strings, ropes, baskets and other such tools. Maybe also the fact that we usually laugh across cultures when somebody falls! That is difficult to prove universally, still, it seem that, at least across ten distant foraging societies, pain and misfortune to be a recurring theme.
Although that list of things seems like a huge set of characteristics, that is nothing when compared with the astonishing diversity of human culture. To find common ground within this diversity is what allows to ask a common question.
Common ground is important, because, even if a lingua franca is shared by different cultural groups, the concepts that are encoded by that language shall also be shared if need to be mutually understood. For example, it is useless to have a word to define a food that is only known by one cultural group. We valencians have given to the world the word Paella, and also an emoji. Paella is both the the pan where the meal is cooked, and the meal itself. Many of the readers might not be familiar with the word paella, you can google it and it would be an easy find. For the ones familiar with the word, probably their knowledge came about by eating the dish itself, and not from reading the definition of Paella. Alternatively, one could have eaten a seafood rice “Arroz con Mariscos” in Peru previously, and when reading about paella, without having actually tried it, been able to understand more or less the concept because these meals, and the experience of eating them, are similar enough even though are called differently and traditional Valencian paella not having seafood, but rabbit and chicken.
In summary, new language and concepts have to be incorporated in the first part by experience, like learning a language for the first time, as newborns do. That takes time. A newborn potentially takes about 2 to 3 years to reach language fluidity through the incorporation and linkage of all the concepts that are being incorporated in the brain, with a vocabulary and a grammar associated. And after that period one never really stops learning, as new concepts and vocabulary keep appearing in ones life, even if it is just the names of new people who are integrated into the human community, such as spouses or newborns. No matter what society we live in, language is something that gets richer and richer throughout ones life.
Similarly, when learning a second language it is significantly easier if the language is close to the one that is already known, especially in terms of vocabulary. Concepts in both languages tend to have words that sounds in a similar way or are closely related. With that the effort to learn is little, because there is a common ground where many bridges are already established. On the other hand, when learning distant languages the effort needed is significant, as each word and concept is virtually new and the bridges have to be build one by one in a process that is somehow equivalent to learn how to speak again, though quite distinct as well, as knowing one language already shapes how one adquires others.
With ideologies, and in general cultures, we can make the analogy with the languages. Similar ideologies have already many bridges of mutual understanding, while distant ones have few points of connection where to build a mutual understanding. Often, for people from one culture to understand the other, there is the need to immerse into the other in order to truly absorb all the concepts needed for a mutual understanding. That is time consuming and impractical.
It is difficult for the members of two different ideologies to truly understand the other. In fact, it is the opposite in many cases, ideologies and identities are on occasion build and defined through the radical opposition to the other. What is reinforced is what makes them different. For example, french youth in the 70s and 80s quickly developed Verlan (l’envers, “the inverted” in french). Velan is a complex argot that flips syllabic order in words. The tradition goes back to at least the XIX c., among prisoners, the underworld and popular groups. But by the end of the XX c., it took off as a generational phenomena to create a code that limits who can understand it. It is generally limited to one or two key words per sentence, while mixed with other known argot. Through language, youth could distinguish themselves and create an identity distinct from the older generations and the wider french society, especially in urban ghettos, where these demographics suffer general societal disenfranchisement. Similarly, in Bouganbille, Papua, the Uisai dialect of Buin, inverted the language gender, not only in nouns but throughout all the linguistic system—pronouns, verbs, numerals, demonstratives and adjectives. Since such change is so profound and systematic, some linguists propose that it was a deliberate act by the Uisai to distinguish themselves from the other Buin communities.
Therefore, for practical proposes, the understanding of the other, and willingness to do so, is what constitutes the basis for a needed mutual understanding.
This process, however, builds upon the biased connections that we already have seen in the previous sections: exchange, commerce, colonization, conquest, universal technical languages, a universal natural language, and as we hinted with maps, nation states.
Upon these connections, there are other levels that we will explore it. Mainly, the export of a set of global ideals by Western powers. This process is not merely limited to the Western World, but I argue that most of intercultural conflicts, oppression and disagreements emerge from a handful of behaviours: how one looks, how one eats, how one fucks, how one works, how one owns, how one kills…
Provably even these last words might arise some emotional reaction in some readers. That reaction, indeed I claim, shapes much of what the aims, and limits, of our question.
Moreover, since the Europeans have proceed to export how one looks, how one eats, how one fucks, how one works, how one owns, how one kills; across the world as a dominant culture, they done so in a brick and mortar way, through infrastructure, and the build up of global institutions.
Finally, for international languages, let us look at a symbolic language that has taken over the World and literally shapes it.
We are talking about maps.
Political maps.
Like most of what we have seen, modern political maps are in part imposed by the Europeans.
Maps are almost as old as pictorial representations of the landscape, as we have seen in the case of [figurative art of the Pleistocene]. Peoples around the world not only represented the animals that surrounded them, but also elements of the landscape, like rivers, mountains or the stars in the constellations. Map-making seems to be quite essential for humans, as even kids can, from an early age, interpret and represent pictorial illustrations of elements of their world.
However, what is quite a Western addition to map-making is the overlaying of political and administrative borders and regions. Clearly delineated areas on a map are only conceptual ideas that exist in the heads of such administrators and their subjects, on top of the geographical depiction of the world.
Though, the representation of land “ownership” on maps can be traced much, much older than European map-making. Like with the division of time, the Babylonians had a head start. By 1800 BC, they were already mapping parcels of arable land. The maps were drawn on clay tablets, with the names of the owners inscribed on them. These documents are great for property-owning rights, especially after each year’s floods destroyed the border markers. These parcel maps are also great for taxation reasons, the reason that these maps were created. Still, these plots of land are far from the political and administrative maps that we are so familiar with now.
A cadastral map for agricultural plots, clearly delimited by straight lines. From 1800 BC in Sippar, Iraq. Coded in Akkadian, imprinted on a terracotta tablet; held by the Ancient Orient Museum, Istanbul.
Moving west, in the classical period, we meet the crazy cartographer Eratosthenes, who by 200 BC wanted a perfect mapping of the World. To achieve that, he set about measuring the circumference of the planet, as we have already seen in THE Metre. But once you have the spherical body that the World is, he also exported the concept of dividing the circle and sphere in latitude/longitude to placing specific geographical features of the planet on a coordinate system that has also become universal: the coordinate system of parallels and meridians. With that basic idea, Eratosthenes set about placing every single point on the Earth into a specific coordinate. 2,200 years later we can easily do this feat with the Global Positioning System. The present GPS, though, improves on Eratosthenes and can even measure the displacement of landmasses after an earthquake and the movement of Australia to the north.
Recreation of Eratosthenes’ World map from texts encoding the latitude and longitude coordinates.
Chinese cartographers had sophisticated mathematical and coordinate traditions of its own. The contrast with the one we have now is that they had different different uses of grids. They divided their maps into rectangular grids, but as far as we know, they did not adapted that grid system to a planetary scale.
The Yu Ji Tu, or Map of the Tracks of Yu Gong, carved into stone in 1137. This map features a graduated scale of 100 li (unit, around 50 km) for each rectangular grid.
Before global oceanic navigation, Chinese, Islamic and European cartographic traditions used coordinate-like systems. Still, the modern coordinate system only became systematically central to global cartography with the onset of global navigation, where Mercator projection of maps that keep consistent meridians and parallels where much more useful to cross oceans than the rule lines that defined the previous Mediterranean navigational charts, the portolans.
The portolans came in the Mediterranean world by the XIII century. A prominent school of Mediterranean navigation charts, called “normal portolan chart” or nautical charts, emerged, and started to be revolutionary in the way that administrations saw themselves, was the onset of the political map.
Originally, the Portolan Chart was limited to the outlines of the coast and the names of the towns and ports along the coast; the interior was left blank, not unlike modern maritime maps. Portolan charts appeared rather suddenly after 1300. They constitute a sharp departure from all earlier maps. The portolan was oriented towards the north and focused on a realistic depiction of geographic distances with a degree of accuracy that is astounding, even by modern standards, which made it a really popular map for navigation. In fact, if we look at it nowadays, we can identify the clearly defined shores of the western Mediterranean, or the whole Mediterranean plus the Black Sea and western Caspian Sea. It is amazing to look at these charts and see how accurate they were.
Carta Pisana, one of the few surviving navigational portolan charts. Unlike the much more decorated prestige versions, the nautical ones, which were much more common, did not survive much beyond their heyday, as the Carta Pisana shows in its deterioration in the upper-right corner.
The standard Portolan Chart emerged in Mallorca and north-western Italy (Pisa and Genoa). I would not enter deeply into the story of nautical map-making, and how the Mallorcan one became a standard. But briefly, the dominance of the Mallorcan school had to do with monks, Genoans, Pisans and Arabs compiling previous versions and nautical voyage information. Mostly, the logs of hundreds of ships and how long they took to go from one port to the other. Any single voyage can be biased by winds and the kinds of vessels, but when you integrate thousands of these, all around in the same area, you get quite an accurate description of where each port is situated from each other.
With the conquest of Mallorca, previously in the hands of a small Muslim kingdom, all that knowledge came together in Mallorca, and was primarly handled by Jewish artisans, who produced the most accurate charts. Then, they added some innovations like the compass rose. These charts, then, were widely copied across the Mediterranean. Like today, whoever has access to a large amount of quality data, and knows how to process it, has the advantage.
Interestingly, later in the XIII century, a stylistic divergence started to emerge between the Mallorcan and Italian schools. Italian portolan charts were sparse and restrained, strictly focused on coastal detail, with the inland areas left largely or wholly empty, and the charts largely bereft of illustrations. Mallorcan, meanwhile, developed a variant that contained inland detail and was replete with rich, colourful illustrations, depicting cities, mountain ranges, rivers and miniature people.
What is relevant here is that the Mallorcan nautical charts were of good detail and extra quality. Wealthy clients started asking them to produce more and more sophisticated, embellished ones, covering not only the western Mediterranean, but attempting to draw a World Map, or at least all the known lands stretching to China and Japan.
For that endeavour, they used all the information that they had, be it accurate or sometimes even mythological. When filling these blank inland spaces with all the information that they could gather, the Mallorcans decided to put a plethora of heraldic symbols, shields, and flags, identifying the ruler of each city. These complex creations were not for navigation but for the status of the buyer, and, amusingly, are better preserved than the nautical ones. A clear example of how luxury has a preservation bias.
Following this tradition of ellavorate maps, by1370 the Catalano-Aragonese royalty commissioned for the creation of a richly decorated chart that displayed all the knowledge of the World at that moment. This creation is called The Catalan Atlas. We do not know exactly how elaborated Portolans ended up in the hands of the Catalano-Aragonese royalty, but it is not difficult to imagine that they saw versions of Portolan charts and commissioned one to be done richly. Some islands, and cities, had well-assigned symbols printed in a two-dimensional representation of the known World. Moreover, some symbols and notations started to become “standardised”, like painting the sea blue, the Red Sea “red”, mountains as peaks or rounded shapes, and the familiar network of rivers.
What is relevant is the case of the Catalan Athlas, and other similarly rich portolans, is that for some islands, the whole territory was painted with the colours of the flag, in effect covering the whole land. Maybe the monarch asked for the heraldic symbols to be prominent in it, or maybe the author decided that the royals would like the touch.
Full display of the Catalan Atlas showing all the way to China on the far right of the map.
From these covering of island landmasses with flags, I argue that, by covering these islands completely with the heraldic symbol, they started the modern tradition of political maps.
In the case of the Catalan Atlas, the island of Mallorca itself was painted in the colours of the Catalano-Aragonese royal family, four stripes of yellow and red. While Rhodes, by the Anatolian mainland, was painted in the Knights Hospitaller flag, because it was controlled by them at the time.
Crop up of the Catalan Atlas highlighting the painting of the island of Mallorca with the Aragonese flag emblem. The islands of Corsica and Sardinia (to the right) are painted in gold to signify their agricultural productivity.
My hypothesis that this painting of Mallorca, and Rhodes, with heraldic colours is the beginning of the modern tradition of political maps might be due to bit of cultural bias. But however it is, the Catalan Atlas is an early example that reached prominence in the European practice of placing your colours into a map to designate territories by the mid-1370s. To be fair, I do not have references on when states put invisible border lines on a map and painted them with a different colour than their neighbours, to signify possession. Probably it is something that more or less was always in the background of the minds and map-making, as the Babylonian map showing the limits and owner of a field already attests.
It is not difficult to imagine how this kind of symbolic, and political, representation could further develop in a contest of who owned more of the parcels of “land” with the flag colours across Europe. In fact, the heir to the Catalano-Aragonese crown gifted the Catalan Atlas to his brother-in-law, the king of France, and it still remains in France.
Moreover, the Catalan Atlas and similar rich maps create the need to fill the “blanks” on the map. Since people wanted these spaces to be “full”, the distant seas of these maps were all covered in miniatures and fake islands. But as knowledge improved, the fictitious islands had to be removed or displaced, and the big pictorial representations on the edges, showing kings and animals, were replaced by “blanks” showing ignorance, the “to come” side, which well aligned with the epoch of exploration by the European merchants, nations and explorers that was coming by the XVI c.
The Europeans kept on developing these two-dimensional representations of the World and, as with the Babylonians, used them to demarcate which land belonged to whom, especially in the case of colonial growth.
This fact of Europeans imposing their World view through maps is well illustrated by the history of how the boundaries and borders of Nepal were drawn. Nepal is one of the few countries in the world that was never directly ruled by a foreign government, though it was not considered an independent state by the British for decades and its foreign affairs were conducted by Britain from 1816 to 1923, although with much more authonomy and independence than the other princely states in British India.
When the British arrived in the subcontinent, they brought with them a European notion of sovereignty, including a novel conception of a nation-state’s boundaries. For the British, and the rest of the European powers, a political boundary was a key feature of a nation-state’s sovereignty: a clearly demarcated line that differentiated between territories. This was as alien to the local (Gorkhali) political tradition as it was to other princely states of the subcontinent, where “boundaries” were fluid constructs defined by physical and geographic features. They were only concerned with the control of villages. That control waxed or waned according to the military strength and vigour of the ruling dynasty.
Nepal’s boundaries were traditionally a fluid affair. Nepalese rule possessed “an unbounded space” that facilitated movements of trade and people. The territorial borders experienced frequent shifts in administration determined by the environment, tribute and taxation claims, which were adjusted year by year, and landholding patterns. Thus, Nepal’s frontiers with the Anglo East India Company oscillated among different agents.
The British viewed borders as fixed and immutable, leading the Company to interpret Nepal’s fluid boundaries as encroachments on British territory. They clearly saw these magical lines on the land that they had seen so many times in their lives.
To better see these lines on the new lands, the East India Company proceeded to survey what they considered the borderlands and fix them in map-making projects. These activities involved carving political and administrative boundaries in Nepal to render the territory “more legible for colonial rule”. These maps served as a strategy for the Company to divide land into non-overlapping, fixed spaces, unlike the traditional shifting and porous Nepali boundaries.
Disputes over territoriality, therefore, constituted a driving cause for the conflict between the Company and Nepal’s fluid borders. By 1813, the British Governor General re-examined the border dispute between Nepal and the Company. Negotiations with the Nepali government to establish a clear boundary soon failed. For example, the Nepalese Commissioners remarked on the futility of debating about a few square miles of territory. About one year later, Britain formally declared war on Nepal. In Britain’s government views, confrontation between the two powers was “necessary and unavoidable”, since there was no clear border.
To solve the protracted war that neither side meaningfully won, but the Company dominated, they signed the Sagauli Treaty (1816). The treaty illustrates how much emphasis the Company put on the detail of the boundaries, for example, stating with extreme detail that “hills eastward of the River Mitchee including the fort and lands of Nagree and the Pass of Nagarcote leading from Morung into the hills“. However, despite the extreme detail, even after the conclusion of the war, the border was not yet settled. The boundary was not defined to the satisfaction of the British until 1830, and still remained a matter of discussion for several years afterwards.
Inset of a 1914 Japanese World map showing Nepal and Bhutan as separate administrative boundaries than British India. By that time other non-European nations already adopted the world view of colouring the surface of the continents in coloured boundaries representing empires and nation-states.
As a result of the war, the treaty took away most of these porous borderlands that Nepal operated with, and a significant part of its pre-war land, like the nominal control of control of the kingdom of Sikkim. Moreover, the Treaty of Sugauli significantly curtailed the independence of Nepal. It was not until 1923 that the British allowed Nepal to fully conduct its foreign policy.
Although political maps were not the only reason for the conflict, the Anglo-Nepali War illustrates how a specific World View of clearly defined boundaries and administrative limits was imposed. Western nations forced, through war and diplomacy, the rest of the World to see the surface of the planet through clearly defined “magical lines” on the land.
As we have seen, other administrations in China, Mesopotamia, South Asia and Mesoamerica, represented territorial jurisdictions and political entities cartographically, however, it is the modern European conception of the sovereign state as a precisely bounded territory became globally dominant through European expansion.
Like English for spoken language, modern political maps are a Western-defined universal language. Now we live in these colourful creations that define how we see the World, and sometimes perversely try to shape that “imagined reality” into the real world, forcing the actual reality of life to adapt to the lens of land, and also seas, covered by neatly delineated lines defining boundaries. This world reality was not common in the World until the Europeans forced it down the throats of everybody else on the planet, by whatever means necessary.
Now we live in this “imagined reality” of nation-states. Now we will see how this reality, this “universal language”, defines how, and who, asks “what does humanity want?”
Through aviation and other technical advances, English became the first language to achieve universal and almost exclusive reach throughout the planet in specific niche areas, especially technical ones. English was the first natural language to be dominant in so many technical areas—with the small caveat that chemistry and taxonomy have many technical terms based on Latin. Other than that, no language got that uncontested global dominance.
As we all know, now English dominance does not stop there; the fact that I am writing this text in English despite my mother tongue being Catalan already shows it. If one thinks today of a global language, of an international language, of a World language, the first one that comes to mind is English, and one would have to think hard to come up with others.
Other candidates for World languages could be those which have enough speakers or have had past prestige or dominance. Again, we can think of classical Latin and Greek as playing that role in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe for a while. Similarly, within their respective zones of influence, Phoenician, Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, written Chinese, Mandarin, Khmer, Malay, Quechua and Maya were, and still are, in similar positions as Latin and Greek. Natural languages that also acted as lingua franca.
Other natural languages have also played a role in the technical landscapes, where vocabulary from the language extended far beyond the natural geographical area by giving names to specific technical features. Before WWII, if one wanted to follow the advancement of science as it progressed, it was necessary to be a versed reader in, at least, French, German and English. This is because during the early phases of the industrialisation of Europe these three centres had comparable influence in the creation and propagation of scientific and technological advances. At the time, no one language dominated over the others, even in the small niche world of science and technology. As we have seen, this shared dominance changed with the appearance of new technologies —like aviation and software—that took off especially during the war years and soon afterwards. Maybe there was the little exception of Russian being used for advanced mathematics, theoretical physics, nuclear physics, rocketry and other highly technical and specialised fields, as a heavy amount of research was done in these areas during Soviet times. During the Cold War years it would help to know Russian if one wanted to keep up with the times. Yet, that time for Russian also ended after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
By the mid-XX c. and especially in the XXI c. English has become the default natural language of the World, with no competitor even close to it in terms of reach, number of second-language speakers and its use in many different fields of international reach—from international law to the language of memes. English has influence in culture, the arts, travel, sports, economics, food, science, technology, romance, infrastructure… Probably there is no area in the world that it has not touched in one way or the other, with maybe the exception of really local traditions that have escaped the reach of anthropologists, missionaries or travellers. Each of these does codify the World in the international language by default, English, or they translate to English whatever was captured in another language.
English is the default natural language to approach virtually any aspect of life when one thinks in international or global reach. It is so much so that when I was travelling in Vietnam, I remember the locals talked to me in “foreign language” because they needed to practise with me their “foreign language” skills. For them English was not just a language, but the language that dominated “foreign” relations and affairs, that is, whatever was of international matters. I, as a traveller from afar, was not expected to have as my working language my own Catalan, but just the default language from “foreign lands”. It was not even called English. It had nothing to do with the origin of a kingdom on a small island off the coast of north-western Europe. It was just The Language of Foreign Affairs. That was not just in Vietnam, but I also heard that expression in many other Asian countries. In these nations, any foreigner was expected to be fluent in that “foreign language”. That expectation would not have been so just 100 years ago. At that time Western Europeans and Russia dominated the planet, but there was a bunch of languages that would have been expected to be known by a traveller. Moreover, if the traveller had scientific training, that person would be expected to be familiar with German, French, English and also Russian. And depending on which part of the world you were, most travellers would know Arabic, Persian, Mandarin and Malay, Spanish and Portuguese.
That dozen of “foreign” dominant languages has slimmed down to just one on the podium. English. The first natural language to hold that position alone, and so far, keep it.
Curiously enough, the English language is a kind of “lingua franca” by itself, with some linguists considering it a “mixed language”, creole or pidgin as 29% of its vocabulary is of French origin, 29% Latin, 26% Germanic, and verbs are inflected for tense and number but not for person. Others say otherwise and argue that it is in fact a Koiné language (the simplification of different dialectal forms in contact). But this is mostly a debate of definitions, on how to divide a continuum. This kind of division of a continuum, and the Sorites Paradox, is something we will explore in the future related to what does humanity want.
However English is defined, for whoever has to learn English for the first time, they soon discover that English is quite simple grammatically. It has no gender, only a handful of irregular verbs and most of the vocabulary is quite simple, with many words composed of pairs of others like “water-fall” to designate something that in many other languages has a proper word, like “cascada” used in many Latin languages. And the fact that cascade also exists in English shows another sign of “lingua franca”, that is, of vocabulary emerging from many different origins and backgrounds.
In fact, this mixture comes as no surprise when one knows a bit of the history of the English kingdom.
It was a Roman province thinly controlled by a military elite which was depleted over the dwindling of the Western Roman Empire. The Celtic population there only partially adopted Latin as their vehicular language, and with the power void left by the absence of the Roman legions, other peoples took the opportunity to fill the power vacuum.
Then came the Anglo-Saxons, from present-day northern Germany and southern Denmark. The Angles have left the name to the country and the Saxons many elements of a Germanic language, built upon strata of Celtic and Latin.
After them came the Norse, another Germanic language from northern Denmark and Norway, which contributed to much of the vocabulary like they, them, their. Also, the interaction between two similar but distinct varieties of Germanic languages contributed to the koinezitation of the Germanic variants. It produced a simplification towards a common grammar, which departed from Old English by greatly reducing the inflectional system which was not shared between them. This simplification, for the happiness of many students of English, increased the amount of regular verbs present, and got away with the almost nightmarish inflection systems that haunt the students of German.
Then, soon afterwards came the Normans, who brought with them French. The aristocracy took over what is now England and they brought with them most of the vocabulary that comes from Latin and can be found in modern English, like the word cascade. The Norman aristocracy left much of the vocabulary on the topics related to the elites, including cuisine, where most of the vocabulary comes from French and Latin, like the word cuisine itself. That makes it easy for us Latin speakers to learn the language—once we learn how crazily the English speakers pronounce our words…
Unfortunately, all is not that easy. At some point by the XV c., someone decided to standardise the written form of English. They adopted the way they spoke at the time, what is called “Middle English”. Middle English and Modern English are quite similar in most aspects, but, unfortunately for us, especially if you are dyslexic like me, the main difference is that the whole southern population decided to change the way they pronounced words. That change is known with the grand name of the “Great Vowel Shift”, which affected mainly vowels and diphthongs’ pronunciation, but also how some consonants became silent. This has left us with the horrible challenge of having to remember by heart how words like bite are spelled, because the correspondence with the actual pronunciation bait is low or nonexistent in many cases.
Moreover, the printing press did a small mess. As we have seen with the standardisation of punctuation, early on, spelling standardisation of printed English happened mostly outside England. Books in English were printed mostly in the nearby Netherlands and Germany, as they had a more developed industry. The typesetters, not being profoundly familiar with English, would adapt German or Dutch spellings to write English words, like adding an h to “ghost”, from the Dutch gheest.
To complicate things further, English nerd writers who thought themselves to have command of classical Greek and Latin tried to reinforce supposed Greco-Latin origins of English words. They happily started adding silent letters to reinforce the real—or imagined—links. For example, dout became doubt (to link it to Latin dubitare), and funnily, iland became island because they convinced themselves that the word came from Latin insula and not from ieg-land, from Old English meaning “water land”.
British (red) and US (blue) spelling of the English language.
The current spelling differences between US and British variants come from dictionary initiatives. English is, famously, a language without an institution in charge of standardising and leading change, unlike neighbouring ones like Spanish and French. In the US, a few decades after its independence, the Webster dictionary (1828) got established as the leading reference for spellings and introduced the simplification of words that used to be written with OU and were shortened to O, like color and neighbor. Z replaced S in many endings of words, like analyze and customize, because of Greek roots and is more phonetic. LL was reduced to L in words like metallic and modelling. Meanwhile, British English kept following Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
Finally, an intriguing attempt at spelling rationalisation came in the saga of the “simplified spelling” movement for US English. The notion here was to scrub English of silent letters and irregular vowel pronunciations, so that have would become hav in a simplified written language. Leading the charge was Melville Dewey, creator of the Dewey Decimal System (oh, you do not know about it? You can guess why, another triumph of standardisation). Melville hilariously demonstrated his commitment to the cause of “simplified spelling” by legally changing his name to Melvil Dui. Dui got his funding from a wealthy donor by 1905, and simplified spelling won support at one point from President Teddy Roosevelt, who tried to instaurate it as the governmental spelling through an executive order. It did not work. The wealthy donor pulled his funding by 1915 with a poignantly spelled note: “I hav been patient long enuf.”
Nevertheless, however easy English is—because of its emergence from a combination of mainly three different linguistic backgrounds—, and however difficult it is—because of the standardisation of it in written form before the Great Vowel Shift and two slightly different standards—, English has become the first natural language to be the dominant and almost universal language of the World. The default cannon, the standard way of communication, the accepted-upon general channel of exchange, the platform upon which to create the connections between different places and peoples of the planet.
English, now, is a truly global codex that, for the first time, has reached and is reaching all aspects of life all around the planet in a way that no other language has ever done on such a scale, depth and speed. A natural language that, like any other language, has adapted, evolved, shifted, transformed, grown, reached new frontiers because of the necessities demanded by its new global role and new global users.
Notwithstanding, the global reach of English and the Anglo-Saxon culture behind it, its dominance happened simply because it has been an opportunistic being that has piggybacked on the extreme connectivity that the planet has taken, starting with the shipping revolution.
Like with Austronesian, the maritime revolution brought a handful of languages to dominate specific locations. But unlike previous connectivity expansion, the new aeronautical and computational revolutions have placed English as the unique global channel of communication.
History could have provided a different outcome, where, like the scientific world before WWII, global communication was shared by a handful of languages. If, like naval powers, different cultures and states reached a similar technological point at a similar rate, other languages might be sitting together for global communication. For example, in aviation the French had an early start with plane-making, and by WWII Germans and Italians had quite advanced military development on planes. Similarly, Polish and German scientists and technicians had early advances in computation, and the USSR and Japan could have invested more in electronics, software development and computation, but never got around to that. It is conceivable that another order could have happened in which a part of the planet rejected the English standard. In fact, that can be partially seen in countries like North Korea, where they firmly reject anything that has hints of Western culture. But nevertheless, even North Korea follows the aviation and software defaults. For better or worse, English stands as a giant alone in the human world.
For this text the fact is that, for now, there is a global acceptance for English to be the default language of communication. That fact, however it is, gives us a tool to address our question, with its usefulness and limits.
In a way, the question of “what humanity wants” can be asked because we, for the first time, can talk in the same language, and it has done so in a somehow passive way, like other standards such as timekeeping. There is not a chunk of the world that is disconnected from that acceptance of the default, there is no major iron curtain that keeps two or more disconnected systems. Since “humanity” has accepted this language, that has allowed English to permeate all the spheres needed for global communication.
