Comment by steveklabnik

Even the idea of "settling on English as a working lingua franca" has issues that display how deep this schism goes. When one of the questions you're exploring is "how exactly does language shape our thinking," for example, picking one language may be limiting what can be expressed, and therefore, thought. Some terms specifically have relationships to their meanings in the language they're written in, and so even English translations leave them in the original language and treat them as jargon.