Slashdot Mirror
125 Years of Longitude 0 0' 00" At Greenwich
An anonymous reader writes "This week marks the 125th anniversary of the International Meridian Conference, which determined that the prime meridian (i.e., longitude 0 0' 00") would travel through Greenwich, UK. One of the reasons that Greenwich was agreed upon 'was that 72% of the world's shipping already depended on sea charts that used Greenwich as the Prime Meridian.' Sandford Fleming's proposal of a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, located at the center of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian, was rejected / not voted on, as it was felt to be outside the purview of the conference."
TOUCHE Dear watson!! I believe we have a winner... gotta love the yanks. It's my way or the Gi-JOE way *rolls eyes*
It's not because English is a vernacular language for most people that it is the de facto lingua franca for the rest of the world. Let's not forget that for a very long time, French was the language of diplomacy for a few centuries, and the official language in the European Union, until the UK and Ireland joined in and bullied their way through.
Please don't confuse lingua franca and a vernacular language. The latter is used to accomodate one of the parties as it's their mother tongue. The former is used as a form of respect, a way of saying "neither of our mother tongues is appropriate for this discussion, so using a neutral language will ease our conversation".
In other words: The rest of the world speaks English because: a/ it's an easy language, b/ most of English speakers are too lazy, or can't be bothered to learn another language.
Really, native English speakers shouldn't be chauvenistic about the fact the rest of the world is speaking their language, they should be ashamed by their inability to accomodate other cultures, and humbled by the fact other people go through the length of learning theirs.