Preface
XV
You fortunately don't need to learn Japanese: Japanese authors do not use
it at the international level, a most courteous stand when you think that,
for them, learning English is a lot more work than learning French is for the
American, or English for the French.
The fact that English has acquired almost the status of an international
common language, or lingua franca, has of course its upside, and any other
reasonably widespread language, as Latin was three centuries ago, would
do. The prevalence of English is often explained by the fact that it is supposedly simpler than, say, German, French, or Russian, and that anyway
anglophones now form a large proportion of scientists at the world level.
As suggested above, this preponderance of English, which goes far beyond
Science, is also, and possibly mainly, a corollary of the enormous resources
American government, industry and private foundations have devoted to Science and Technology since the 1940s and more generally of the overwhelming
superiority of the American economy18.
There is in France, and probably elsewhere too, a theory according to
which, thanks to the overwhelming power America acquired in 1945 and still
more in 1990, the result, or even purpose, of the "invasion of English" is to
spread across the whole world the American conceptions of society, politics,
economy, technology, mass media, etc. and to help American enterprises to
acquire larger and larger parts of foreign markets everywhere, a process that,
although or because successful, meets strong opposition in many countries.
Although greatly reinforced by WW II, it started much sooner. The use
in America of such typical expressions as "richest in the world", "greatest in
the world", "tallest in the world", "fastest in the world", "first in the world" ,
etc. was already widespread in the 1900s and was a plain enough symptom.
Standard Oil, General Electric, Ford were models of multinational companies
that European enterprises tried (generally without much success at the time,
if you except I. G. Farben in the 1920s) to imitate. American sewing machines,
typewriters and accounting machines, agricultural machinery, machine tools
and, between WW I and WW II, automobiles were invading Europe long
before computers did. In the 1920s, jazz had already its fanatics everywhere,
Hollywood's movies had already 60-80% of the French market, most of the
best movie theaters were in American hands, and the answer to French attempts to impose import quotas was a near total boycott of French movies
in America (19 in 1929, against hundreds of American movies in France),
a situation which did not improve after WW II. After 1918 it was Wilson,
a U.S. President with the mind and eloquence of a Protestant missionary,
who launched the Society of Nations, which Congress rejected. The United
States' interventionist policy was already quite plain in the Americas, China
and Japan long before the end of the XIXth century, and as a recent book 19
IS In some French companies, meetings of the Board are in English because of the
presence of one or two American members. At the present time, about 20% of
the total capitalisation of the Paris Stock Exchange is American-owned.
19 Philippe Roger, L'ennemi americain. Genealogie de l'antiamericanismefran~ais
(Paris, Seuil, 2002, 600 pp.) puts everything in historical perspective without
XV
You fortunately don't need to learn Japanese: Japanese authors do not use
it at the international level, a most courteous stand when you think that,
for them, learning English is a lot more work than learning French is for the
American, or English for the French.
The fact that English has acquired almost the status of an international
common language, or lingua franca, has of course its upside, and any other
reasonably widespread language, as Latin was three centuries ago, would
do. The prevalence of English is often explained by the fact that it is supposedly simpler than, say, German, French, or Russian, and that anyway
anglophones now form a large proportion of scientists at the world level.
As suggested above, this preponderance of English, which goes far beyond
Science, is also, and possibly mainly, a corollary of the enormous resources
American government, industry and private foundations have devoted to Science and Technology since the 1940s and more generally of the overwhelming
superiority of the American economy18.
There is in France, and probably elsewhere too, a theory according to
which, thanks to the overwhelming power America acquired in 1945 and still
more in 1990, the result, or even purpose, of the "invasion of English" is to
spread across the whole world the American conceptions of society, politics,
economy, technology, mass media, etc. and to help American enterprises to
acquire larger and larger parts of foreign markets everywhere, a process that,
although or because successful, meets strong opposition in many countries.
Although greatly reinforced by WW II, it started much sooner. The use
in America of such typical expressions as "richest in the world", "greatest in
the world", "tallest in the world", "fastest in the world", "first in the world" ,
etc. was already widespread in the 1900s and was a plain enough symptom.
Standard Oil, General Electric, Ford were models of multinational companies
that European enterprises tried (generally without much success at the time,
if you except I. G. Farben in the 1920s) to imitate. American sewing machines,
typewriters and accounting machines, agricultural machinery, machine tools
and, between WW I and WW II, automobiles were invading Europe long
before computers did. In the 1920s, jazz had already its fanatics everywhere,
Hollywood's movies had already 60-80% of the French market, most of the
best movie theaters were in American hands, and the answer to French attempts to impose import quotas was a near total boycott of French movies
in America (19 in 1929, against hundreds of American movies in France),
a situation which did not improve after WW II. After 1918 it was Wilson,
a U.S. President with the mind and eloquence of a Protestant missionary,
who launched the Society of Nations, which Congress rejected. The United
States' interventionist policy was already quite plain in the Americas, China
and Japan long before the end of the XIXth century, and as a recent book 19
IS In some French companies, meetings of the Board are in English because of the
presence of one or two American members. At the present time, about 20% of
the total capitalisation of the Paris Stock Exchange is American-owned.
19 Philippe Roger, L'ennemi americain. Genealogie de l'antiamericanismefran~ais
(Paris, Seuil, 2002, 600 pp.) puts everything in historical perspective without