Today, more people speak and write English than any other language. Germanic tribes were the first people in Britain to speak English. This was around the year 500 AD. It was called the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) period at the time. During the Middle English period (1150–1500), prepositions like by, with, and from replaced many Old English word endings. We are now living in the Modern English time period, which began in the 1600s.
Old English only had about 50,000 to 60,000 words, but now there are about a million. This makes English by far the largest language. The average educated person knows about 20,000 words but only uses about 2,000 words a week. Even though it is used by a lot of people, only about 350 million people speak it as their first language.
It's the language used at the Olympics. More than half of the technical and scientific magazines in the world are written in English, as are three quarters of the world's letters, telex messages, and cables. About 80% of the information stored on computers around the world, including this text, is also in English. Five of the biggest broadcasting companies send English to more than 100 million people every day (CBS, NBC, ABC, BBC, CBC). It looks like English will stay the language most people speak for a while.
The United States of America was a leader in the field of finance, which grew out of mercantilism. At the time, studying anything other than economics was seen as less important than studying hard sciences like math, chemistry, and physics, and kissing up in the king's court was seen as very important. This is why the United States had the first business schools and why it still has the most of them. There are a lot of words in finance, like "put" and "call," that don't have an exact equivalent in any other language.
It is very important that you learn more about money. The fact that I have a Ph.D. in the field and have worked as a futures and options trader and long-term stock investor has given me a much deeper understanding of financial terms than the average person.
I have a big vocabulary when it comes to money because I have spent many years getting my Ph.D. and working directly in investments. This lets me get the main point of readings and conversations about investing that most people don't understand. Many investors fail not because they aren't smart (I'm averagely smart), but because they don't understand how the stock market works. This is due in large part to the fact that the average person on the street hasn't learned many words. If you take the time to learn financial terms, you will do better as an investor over time.
