The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.
There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one and when I hear of one that is dying it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.