Sublime

The Portuguese were a network, held together by religion and language, and with better sources of market information in long-distance trades than their purely Asian counterparts.11 Portuguese became the lingua franca of maritime Asia. The very marginality of the Portuguese as an alien maritime subculture helped to make them acceptable to government

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The same goes, of course, for human beings. The distancing effect of language facilitates exploitation, cruelty, murder, and genocide. When the other party to a relationship is a mere member of a generic category, be it “customer,” “terrorist,” or “employee,” exploitation or murder comes much more easily. Racial epithets serve the same purpose: we

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The next group to go in for English was the scientists. Modern science has always been international, and scientists were accustomed to having to learn one another’s languages to read the latest research. In the twentieth century, they seriously considered adopting invented languages to speed their work. They were particularly interested in a postw

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Until well into the seventeenth century, the Ottoman sultans balanced their dependence on the political and military service of the Turkish aristocracy by recruiting a slave army of Muslim converts (perhaps seven or eight thousand a year) separated in childhood from their Christian parents. Devshirme recruitment obliterated the ties of kinship and

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