We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in peoples' status. We're told that this too is to be attributed not to any biological shortcomings but to social disadvantages and limited opportunities. We see in our daily lives that some of the conquered peoples continue to form an underclass, centuries after the conquests or slave imports took place.
Of course, we're taught that it's not polite to say so in public. “It seems logical to suppose that history's pattern reflects innate differences among people themselves. The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal If English becomes a world language, that won't be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy.” Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure.
Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English.
The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the preeminent languages of western philosophy. For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. There's no single purpose "best" language instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. “Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects.
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