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From: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com (Julian Pardoe LADS LDN X1428)
Subject: Re: basic"english"-another critique
Message-ID: <D550zE.I1v@tigadmin.ml.com>
Sender: usenet@tigadmin.ml.com (News Account)
Reply-To: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com
Organization: Merrill Lynch Europe
References: <D4o5MB.M2E@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca>
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 1995 20:02:01 GMT
Lines: 36

In article M2E@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca, selvakum@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca
(C.R.Selvakumar) writes:
> The popularity of English is due to politics and the heavy influence
> of US and not due to England

At the risk of blowing a nationalistic trumpet I think that the fact that
Britain had a huge colonial empire and was for a while by far and away
the world's most important economy might have a little to do with the
spread of English.

In it's time the British economy was probably far more dominant than
the US economy ever has been -- for a while Belgium was the world's second
industrial nation!  Britain's economic strength gave it immense influence
in countries such as Argentina that weren't actually colonies.

> That US was a former colony is of no consequence.

Except that it was by the setting up of Britain's American colonies that 
the English language became established in North America.  Clearing the
Dutch and French out of most of North America (and swallowing up various
other European colonies) might also have had a little to do with it[*].

OK, so since WW2 the power of the US has done much to popularize the
English language but I think we Brits can claim to have made a small
contribution to the process.

Char mi estas Esperantisto, ne estas klare al mi, ke la disvastigho de
la angla lingvo estas fenomeno senhezite aprobinda :-)

-- jP --

[*] and after all the American revolution was a revolution of free-born
Englishmen (even if born on the other side of the Atlantic) against a
nasty German monarch and his nasty German mercenaries, so... :-)


