Funny but English as a Lingua Franca is a thing. English has become a widely understood international language so its not just used to talk to native English speakers but also as a common language between non-native speakers.
Italians (Latin) and Greeks were salty before them. And the Anglo-Saxons will be salty when Chinese, Indian or an African language becomes the new lingua franca. That’s
Why would the lingua franca change again? No type of Chinese, Indian, nor any African language has even remotely the same spread as English does. I’d wager some proficiency in English exist in a sizeable part of the population in almost every country on earth, same can’t be said for most other languages (if any).
If history is anything to go by, the English speaking world runs into some trouble. Nothing much new comes out in English while somebody else becomes dominant in research and publishes in their language. That’s getting picked up in academia and politics and if anyone wants to be up to date, they learn that language. The other language now starts to distribute their movies exposing more people who pick up that language and spreading from there.
Sure, that can take a few generations. It’s not like everybody just decided to switch right now
The thing is, we can’t exactly go by history since we’ve never been as interconnected as we are now. Intercontinental travel could potentially be seen as “just” a huge step up in transportation compared to the past but the internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate. When it comes to technology and science, English is the de facto standard and it’s gonna take something pretty huge to disrupt that.
Disruptions are in the near future. Energy systems are changing, climate change is going to wreck things, wannabe dictators starting wars and others. Usually one of those isn’t a problem but a lot of those at the same time wrecked past civilizations. But you can’t predict how it’ll all turn out.
Yes, but the prerequisite is kind of that they will wreck the west (which is the main region keeping English as the lingua franca) but not the other regions when the west is likely going to be less impacted by a lot of issues than other parts of the world, for example just due to geography.
The key difference is that 200 years ago they couldn’t easily instantly speak to someone across the globe. And, they didn’t get news quickly when something happened halfway across the world.
Never in history though has there already been a language this dominant across the world, has there? I look at it this way, two things need to happen for a new language to become dominant – there needs to be both an impetus and a strong candidate.
I’m not entirely sure what impetus there would be. What we’ve had so far is everyone else using the language. What would cause that to happen? You’d need a sizable number of people who simultaneously have global influence and don’t typically use English. Right now one precludes the other. It’s why there isn’t a strong candidate either – the language would need to have widespread use and honestly be the preferred language in some fields globally.
I can think of two possible candidates, but it’s still a stretch. Latin is probably the most widely used, but no one uses it conversationally. Japanese goes along with your comment about movies – the anime industry has been successful on a global level to the point that people prefer to listen to it in Japanese even if they don’t understand it.
I think that’s the bellwether we need to look for. Whatever the successor language is, it will need to be adopted by people who don’t understand it but still prefer it. It faces the challenge of supplanting the dominant language for the entire globe, not just a region of the world.
Right now there is no reason to believe that will change but we cannot predict the future. Thus far no language has remained the common one permanently.
The term lingua franca derives from Mediterranean Lingua Franca (also known as Sabir), the pidgin language that people around the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean Sea used as the main language of commerce and diplomacy from late medieval times to the 18th century, most notably during the Renaissance era. During that period, a simplified version of mainly Italian in the eastern and Spanish in the western Mediterranean that incorporated many loan words from Greek, the Slavic languages, Arabic, and Turkish came to be widely used as the “lingua franca” of the region, although some scholars claim that the Mediterranean Lingua Franca was just poorly used Italian.
I know. Joke is that frenchies see their language on the highest pedestal possible. And additional joke is in similarity of words “French” and “franca”.
Erm. English is the world language. In science and all international bodies. Why wouldn’t we use English to communicate with people from other countries when not at least one person speaks the native language of the other (yes, that happens, and then we don’t speak English)?
But first, you need all the guns (and other modern weaponry) to gun down anyone trying to kill you. Might be useful to make them listen to you as well.
Eh. Like 90%+ of everybody who ever lived in pre-Industrial civilization was a slave or a serf or something like that. What does that say about the other 1% that “owned” them? And if your goal is explicitly to bring lots of revolutionary technologies, you’re probably going to disrupt a lot of established power structures. People in power don’t tend to take kindly to that, and as the ultimate outsider, you’ll be the perfect scapegoat for anything that goes wrong.
It’s dumb to think only about fighting, and this specific scenario isn’t something that you’re ever going to be able to win through brute force alone. Also, using guns “to make them listen to you”, as the original comment said, sounds pretty evil depending on how it’s done. (E.G. Menace and threaten anyone questioning you: Evil. Gain favour with the royal army by providing guns, then ask for funding for medical research: Less evil.) But ultimately, it’s reasonable to be prepared for other people to act in bad faith.
Skip electricity. That doesn’t matter until you can make reliable turbines with copper and magnets. Go to steam power first. It can move things. Which will speed up delivery of copper and magnets. But also teach them to plant trees. Every tree removed to smelt and power a steam engine needs to have three more planted. You could start greening the Sahara before umit even starts collapsing. “he sure had this steam thing figured out. I guess we will forgive him for all these useless trees”.
Boil water in a closed system that uses steam to move a paddle on the inside that is on the same shaft as a wheel on the outside. That’s the basics. Everything else is just variations on the theme. The higher the pressure the faster it goes and more torque you get.
Nah, for a first step implementation in stationary applications, you can have a steam machine run an open circuit. Steam expands, performs work, exits through a valve. Just keep the water tank filled. Less efficient, but it would work. The return loop is an optimization for the next stage :)
For better efficiency the steam should be used twice, in a high pressure circuit first and on its way back to the boiler through a low pressure circuit.
Yes, electricity would be magic for medieval (and prior) people. Spells trouble for you.
But no, Steam… the principle was known and seldom used by ancient greeces and egypts already, but they couldn’t really utilize it, because metallurgy wasn’t there yet.
And Sahara was almost green 1000+ years ago, lots of oases.
Without a printing press, which would increase the levels of literacy, and allow sharing knowledge orders of magnitude faster, there was no indication that a kettle could ever outperform a hundred men or a few dozen horses.
I’d say it depends on the person. I’m sure there are some that would majorly change the course of history and then some that would get killed within an hour
The problem with this is that you assume that wood is the best fuel source for steam. Very quickly you would realize that coal is far more energy dense than just about anything except nuclear fission. Planting trees is still a good idea though, but wood as fuel is utter shite on any large application.
Domo is a modifier. Combined with arigato it means thank you very much. It can also mean “thanks” on its own, and it can mean “hello” on its own. Japanese is a little odd like that. Arigato can be spelled with or without the u, same for domo.
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