Why I’m glad to speak English
So I was reading about Carl Scheele the other day. You don’t know who Carl Scheele is? That’s because he was Dutch.
Humphrey Davy is generally accepted to have discovered Oxygen, along with eleven other elements, but here’s the thing; Carl Scheele discovered it 36 YEARS before Davy did so independently. If only Scheele could have told somebody, he would have the recognition and admiration he deserves today, the poor Dutch bugger.
Davy instantly published an article in an english-speaking journal, and got the praise. And the girls, probably. Although let’s be fair, if a girl’s got looks she isn’t gonna go into chemistry, so Scheele got a lucky escape there.
There must be millions of people out there, living in Uzbekistan and The Ukraine, with the potential to become great minds, great scientists, great artists, but there’s nowhere for them to go, so they just grow up and become farmers like their fathers were. No matter how clever a child growing up in Kazakhstan is, no matter how hopeful they are of growing up to become a rockstar or a great author, they never will. They’ll settle down, inherit the farm from their parents and spend the rest of their life in the company of sheep.
If the human race ever wants to find a grand unifying theory or a cure for cancer, why do we rely solely on the fraction of us that speak English? After all, we might have already found the meaning of life… it’s just in Urdu.