How English Took Over the World
The English Divide
In 1794, while hiding from the Jacobins during the French Revolution, the Marquis de Condorcet wrote his landmark work, The Progress of the Human Mind. Condorcet, an advocate of educational reform and equal rights, believed that the key to social equality was equality in the use and learning of language. Condorcet’s concern was that Latin had held a monopoly over claims to truth until vernacular languages made the sciences “more popular” and widely available. If Latin had continued, he said, it “would have divided men into two classes, would have perpetuated in the people prejudices and errors, [and] would have placed an insurmountable impediment to true equality […] to an equal knowledge of necessary truths.” Condorcet’s thoughts on language echoed those ex pressed several centuries earlier by Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet and moral philosopher, whose epic poem, La Divina Commedia, set aside the elitism of Latin to create an Italian vernacular more accessible to “the people.”
Inasmuch as Condorcet endorsed vernacular languages, he also believed that “politics in the vernacular” was merely a “transitional phase.” Universal education ultimately
