Le Baron wrote:Cainntear wrote:Le Baron wrote:It's not my opinion, it is an established body of facts. Don't blame me for you being unaware of it.
Again, you're stating that your point of view is objective fact... why? What is the background that qualifies you to do this?
Well I wouldn't say 'qualifies' me in every respect, but I spent 12 years as a senior researcher under a reader in economic history at a fairly prestigious university. I did a lot of research on the use of culture and language in building colonial influences and hegemonies (usually economic via cultural influence).
Now I could be merely saying all that, because everyone wants documentary evidence for every utterance. However I'm not prepared to post my life on the internet to be searched and torn apart for delectation.
I wasn't going to demand proof. Again, when I mentioned evidence before, it was because you were saying that what you said was objectively true and what I said was objectively false.
I'm actually quite surprised by that, though. As a professional historian, I would have expected you to understand that history is open to interpretation. History tells us correlation, but not causation, because there's no control experiment -- we can't say for sure things would have turned out significantly differently if one particular event hadn't happened. And as a professional economist, I would have expected you to understand about complex systems and emergent phenomena, rather than offhandedly poo-pooing the whole idea as "Woolworth's pick-and-mix".
Here's a thought to consider... it's an entirely unprovable and unfalsifiable argument, but that's OK, cos we're talking about history:
If English's strength comes through propaganda, one of the most powerful forms of pro-English propaganda came unintentionally from the eastern bloc authorities. By overemphasising the evils of America, they created a false dichotomy, and given that the regimes in communist countries were oppressive and authoritarian, in doing so they effectively presented the idea that America was the epitome of freedom and free expression. Not only did bootleg US recordings gain even more cachet than their legitimate counterparts in Western Europe, the act of learning the language became an expression of rebellion.
I suggest that the lifting of the iron curtain accelerated the uptake of English as a lingua franca, as the first eastern Europeans to break out into the wider world had pretty good English (by the standards of the time) and likely good German, but no knowledge of French, Spanish, Italian etc.
Even within eastern European countries where Russian had served as the common language for decades, English quickly took over as lingua franca, not as a western imposition, but as a means of eliminating Russian.
Now I'm not going to ask you to accept that I'm right, but I don't see how you can say I'm definitely wrong.