How about winning the two world wars and taking all the scientist worth their name out of Germany?<p>Remember that before WWII US of America was like China is today, a very powerful industrializing country, but with a lack of formal education.<p>American products were inferior to German-Austrian-Swizzerland ones, but they were able to manufacture at a massive rate that Germanic countries were not able to compete.<p>After winning WWII, half of the great German scientists went to USA(west Germany), the other half went to Russia(east Germany).<p>German scientist were the ones that directed the Space programs both in US and Russia and educated native scientists along with other European ones that traveled to US as their countries were devastated after the war.
The last bit concerning the flexibility of foreign word adoption is key, I think. I heard a radio story a long time ago on the topic of word mutation in the English language (I think it was a story on ebonics). The theory was put forward that you could estimate the rate of foreign adoption based on the rate of mutation in the language. The thought being that foreigners to the language weren't simply bringing with them fragments of their mother tongue, they were dropping rules of the language that didn't make sense to them (or were too difficult for them to remember). For example, English nouns once had gender - but that was dropped a long time ago. The plural form of words were much stranger back in the day as well, compared to today where in most cases you can postfix an "s". As far as the OP, I don't know enough about German to compare mutation rates - I'd be interested to hear from somebody who does know enough to make the comparison.
> German is criminalised in 23 states. You're not allowed to speak it in public, you're not allowed to use it in the radio, you're not allowed to teach it to a child under the age of 10.<p>I found that striking - how could someone just ban a language? - but then I remembered learning about Romanian being banned during the Hungarian occupation of Transylvania (where I currently live). I'm sure there are many other examples throughout history.
German doesn't simply adopt english words but uses English word-stems to build things that don't exist in English. Handy for mobilephone, beamer for projector. We also kind of like our shitstorm: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitstorm" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitstorm</a>
How about observation bias as another reason. There are plenty of research papers written in Russian and Chinese (fewer every decade of course), but they aren't considered for Nobel prizes and they aren't reported on in the Western media because people in the West aren't exposed to them.<p>A famous example is stealth aircraft, that's based on a Soviet research written in Russian and took a roundabout way to reach the US aircraft manufacturers.
We should be happy: For all its warts (horrible, horrible spelling) English is an order of manitude saner than German and a few other European languages. Imagine if you had to keep track of which (for all intents and purposes more or less randomly assigned) genders any thing had. Imagine if a/an had 12- 44 different forms instead of two and was dependent on the position, movement, a randomly assigned "gender" as well as ownership of the object in question. This is what German and a few other languages are like. Utterly stupid but it would sound ridiculous if we dropped it now. Just saying.<p>(Source: native speaker of one of those.)
Coincidentally, I've just been reading about Esperanto. It seems slightly nutty in today's climate of English dominance. But when you needed to learn several natural languages to communicate internationally, it made far more sense to pine for a simple, neutral common tongue.
This is kind of funny. When I was in grade school one of my teachers told me "French is the language of science. If you want to be a scientist you'll have to learn French."