Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh | Hacker News Reader

Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

cardiff.ac.uk

55 pointsTomte66 comments

Owain added new scientific terms to the Welsh dictionary.

These include:

    “damcaniaeth dwysedd ffwythianolion” meaning “density functional theory”
    “brasamcan graddiant cyffredinol” which means a “general gradient approximation”
    “dull gwahaniaeth feidriadd” which translates as “finite difference method”

Which sort of disproves the hypothesis that 'Welsh Is a Language for Science'.

Not in the slightest.

When Isaac Asimov was doing his doctoral thesis in Chemistry the defacto language for reading and understanding any applied | industrial chemistry work was German.

The three Welsh examples above appear to the untrained eye just as long, unweildly, and complex as German expressions in chemistry .. the real test is whether they become easier with familiarity and regular use.

My point was not that the additions are unweildly, it was that they were necessary.

Long and complex-looking terms in the de facto language of a particular area of research are quite different from long and complex-looking novel terms in a highly localised minority language which the speakers of that language would have difficulty parsing.

But… why should anybody use them? How large can the chemical community in Wales ever be? And what is the advantage over English?

There is a very good linear algebra textbook available online for undergrads by A.O. Morris written in Welsh (as he was a native speaker), after the English edition went out of print.

I get it. I'm a native French Canadian Speaker. My maternal tongue is important to me, to us. But when it comes to science, English is the Lingua Franca of STEM.

The giant leaps that humanity has achieved over the past 500 years were made because people on the shoulder of giants; who spoke the lingua franca of the time. Back then Latin, now English.

let me disagree with that; many argues that modern science started with Galileo. The guy knew Latin. But he decided to write in Italian (and not Latin), because he wanted his results to be accessible to "everybody", and useful.

I agree that English has reached the Latin status today, but - in the bigger picture - it's just spoken by a cosmopolitan elite, most of the people don't speak it or they don't speak it well.

So, there is always a strong case for doing science, or everything, really, in your local language, especially if you want to be really inclusive.

p.s. I am not saying that people shouldn't strive to learn english, but there is a BIG case to use your own language, both for science and business.

In this case, Welsh is not the local language of Cardiff, nor is it for large areas of Wales (judging by % of Welsh speakers).

yes, in this case it's preserving a language that is almost dead, because killed by English internal colonialism/centralism so to say, and preserving a language is also a good endeavor.

In fact, I would go further, and say that Welsh in Cardiff is spoken almost exclusively by an upper middle-class "elite". You can say that publishing in Welsh helps preserve the language, but you can't argue that it's good for making science accessible or useful.

Edit:

>because killed by English internal colonialism/centralism so to say

If we trace the origins of the languages currently spoken in the UK, it's much more correct to say that all of the original languages were pushed out by foreign influence from the continent.

indeed i was answering TeeMassive’s comment, and not to the main topic. In this case, the goal of writing a PhD in a (all but) dead language, it's to keep it alive, not to be inclusive.

i really don't know what's the social makeup of Welsh speakers (if any); but i understand it's a very niche thing, and not really useful for inclusivity of science; but again: it's not something i was arguing. i was talking about "real" languages with a base of active speakers.

overall, for sure keeping a language alive is a good endeavor on its own, and that was the PhD's goal.

>> If we trace the origins of the languages currently spoken in the UK, it's much more correct to say that all of the original languages were pushed out by foreign influence from the continent.

ahaha, no. welsh it has been killed "recently" by internal policies, about education etc. not because the Normans influence or whatever.

>i really don't know what's the social makeup of Welsh speakers

There's a helpful map here:

https://datamap.gov.wales/maps/welsh-language-statistics/

Zooming in on Cardiff shows exactly what I described - Welsh is more common (although still rare) in affluent suburbs, and the central part of town along with the poorer suburban housing developments have the lowest level of Welsh.

Outside Cardiff, the effect is essentially reversed - rural areas with a (very) long farming heritage are among the few places where Welsh continues to be used as a daily language.

I think this scenario is quite easily explained due to the amount of funding given to the Welsh language and the corresponding jobs created centreing on Cardiff, as well as the requirement for members of the Welsh Government to speak Welsh.

Good map. As someone who grew up in Cardiff it doesn't surprise me to see this distribution. A lot of media roles are also billingual in Cardiff.

I've got a GCSE in Welsh (having been one of the first years to have to do it mandatory). Used it once in anger up in North Wales. It was a difficult language to learn and I'd have preferred to continue with another European language ideally. I'll probably try to teach my daughter some Welsh though (she was born in England and will go to school in England).

>ahaha, no. welsh it has been killed "recently" by internal policies, about education etc. not because the Normans influence or whatever.

My point exactly. The onwards march of that awful mongrel language English, trampling all of our original Celtic languages, continues to this day!

Regional languages and dialects often decline with the emergence of modern states without a directed centralised effort to kill them.

I have a friend, free_glamorgan. Sounds like you guys should meet up!

Calling a language that is spoken by hundreds of thousands of people "almost dead" is a strange claim. A quick search suggests Welsh is in the top 7% of languages spoken worldwide.

Maybe stagnated is a better word. I know a language where you can talk about everyday things, and so can probably a hundred million other people. But no one can talk about any topic more advanced than an elementary school subject without switching to a bigger language.

It might not be spoken by "everybody", but it is an official language.

It was only recently that there was headline news over parking fines being overturned because the demands were not available in Welsh. The fact that the driver could speak/read English was not an adequate defense:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/10/driver-wins-...

The Welsh nation has decided preserving and encouraging the use of their language is a good thing, and they should be saluted for it. Gaelic, and other local languages have suffered due to disuse and neglect, and Welsh is a post-child for the effectiveness of teaching it in schools and "forcing" it to be supported. Usefully.

>Welsh is a post-child for the effectiveness of teaching it in schools and "forcing" it to be supported. Usefully.

You can say it's a good thing that an ancient language and corresponding culture is being saved (although I would also argue that draining Welsh speakers from their familial localities by proving strong financial incentives to move to Cardiff is ultimately doing huge damage to the cultural heartlands of Wales), but I can't agree with this statement. Census data shows that Welsh language usage has decreased slightly over the past 10 years, and Welsh-language schools (funded at extra cost to taxpayers as a parallel school system) do not perform as well academically as mainstream schools. Sure, everyone here has done a Welsh GCSE, but it's largely considered a joke and kids boast about how little they learned.

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/welsh-medium-school-pupils-...

Nit: "poster child" for the effectiveness [etc], as in such a perfect example that you would put it on a poster to represent them.

In looking this up to be sure of my comment, I learned that it originally comes from children on posters requesting support against a specific disease: https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/poster-child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poster_child

> I agree that English has reached the Latin status today, but - in the bigger picture - it's just spoken by a cosmopolitan elite, most of the people don't speak it or they don't speak it well.

No way, English is nowhere close to the Galileo-era Latin status.

If that were true, then Americans and British and Australians etc. would be learning it as a second-language just to communicate with one-another, because their native/local usage would have fragmented to badly that each would have its own new name.

Also, there are few hundred million people in the world who speak English but are hardly "the cosmopolitan elite" because they learned it natively without relying on any additional education and/or live in rural areas.

Actually that would result in people having to learn multiple languages to understand the scientific literature and make the baseline more "elite", like how mathematical research used to be in french, german and russian two centuries or so ago. Its better theres only at most one extra language to learn (English) than mutiple.

Plenty of research only last century was done in French, German and Russian: a friend is doing their PhD partially on the parallel development of climate science in English and non-English published papers - especially in Russian, for Cold War reasons, lots of work never seemed to cross the language barrier and was simply duplicated (or never appeared on the other side).

It's exclusive not inclusive, most of the people in Wales don't speak Welsh.

Latin was a dead language at the time while English is the most commonly spoken language on earth.

> it's just spoken by a cosmopolitan elite, most of the people don't speak it or they don't speak it well.

The same statement could be made about science. It’s a subject that’s mostly practiced by the cosmopolitan elite. In fact, even more so: you can’t be on the leading edge of science without being engaged in the global discourse around it.

Additionally, it’s actually quite common outside of English speaking countries for people to be multilingual. Using a common language for science really isn’t a big deal.

It is actually quite common for people outside of English-speaking countries to complain about having to write in English in order to publish, it is indeed seen as a big deal. When an academic does not have flawless English, he/she is often forced to pay a considerable sum of money for language revision of their papers. Peer reviewers often say in their reports “This paper can be accepted provided that the following modifications are made: … the language is revised by a native English speaker.”

Well then what is the alternative?

I agree that is an unfair burden, but the goal of publishing is to have your paper read. Ultimately that’s going to mean translating it at some point into English or some other lingua franca, or have it translated into numerous other languages.

The complaint here isn’t about publishing in English, it’s about the burden of translation being on the author rather than the reader.

Unrelated, but, IIRC, Tolkien (whom one could perhaps regard as a language connoisseur) had a peculiar taste for languages, and Welsh was in fact his favorite?

He had particular affection for Welsh and Finnish, from what I remember. His academic specialty was Old English.

He must have really liked long words!

I believe Welsh was one of the main inspirations behinds his elvish conlang Sindarin.

I think that it's great and he's doing a service for his language. Nothing stops him from providing an abstract or translating the thesis in other languages.

If someone had told me while I was writing up that I should translate my thesis into another language I think my brain would have exploded

Really? Just write it in your native language (Welsh in this case) and have someone translate it. For most languages, not a big problem and the uni surely has the resources to do it. Here, the additional effort is the creation of the Welsh words that don't exist and maintaining the list for a Welsh to English translator.

> For most languages, not a big problem and the uni surely has the resources to do it.

This is extremely uninformed. Not only will universities not translate your dissertation for you, they usually won’t even revise the English if you are a non-native speaker and wrote in that language. You have to pay for the costs of language revision out of your grant funding or even out of your own pocket. And this is not cheap. At standard rates and standard length of a standard PhD thesis, one could expect to pay nearly a thousand euro for mere language revision. The costs of translation of a dissertation from one language into another would run already into the thousands of euro.

Honestly, unis are generally resourced enough that they could pull it off, were there the will to do it, and it certainly wouldn't be the least efficient use of their resources. But as with all things related to grad student exploitation, getting funds to do that through formal structures is like wringing blood from a stone.

Even in countries where grad students are not exploited, where all PhD students are paid a local middle-class salary, universities still don’t generally provide such language services for free. If the PhD student is working under a funded project, then why should the university pay if the grant money can? Or if the student must pay out of his own pocket, then this one-time expense is seen as something that a student can manage himself instead of the university incurring further costs.

Universities are often resourced in that they will maintain a pool of knowledgeable native speakers of English or the local language who can provide language revision. It’s just that that service won’t be free.

Euros?? Where are you? It's a Welsh university. I wouldn't be surprised if the university wants to both promote the Welsh language and diffuse its research, and proposes such resources.

I am based on the continent, but I am a native English speaker owning a language-services business that serves academic clients internationally, so I am very familiar with the landscape. I for one would be surprised if the university proposed translation out of its own pocket. Even if one is dealing with a minority language that could use some support, universities overwhelmingly want the costs for these things to fall on some source of funds other than the university.

Well if someone else was going to do it then I'm sure my brain would have been fine and there would have been no need for explosions. It wouldn't be that straightforward to find someone to translate a thesis though, you'd need to be fluent in the languages and have enough knowledge in the specialist area

Crafting new scientific & technical vocabulary is a thing that all minority languages have to deal with. It's a fascinating task.

And thus guaranteeing that nobody will read his dissertation, and making it even less likely that he'll be a successful academic.

No, it's not. If Owain (the PhD who wrote his thesis in Welsh) wanted to be productive and advance his field, he would want his research to have the largest audience possible. Quoting the article:

'In his thesis, ‘Astudiaeth Gyfrifiadurol o Synthesis a Sefydlogrwydd Defnyddiau Mandyllog Anorganig’, Owain used computational science to see how porous materials could be used for green energy processes and sustainable chemistry.

Owain’s PhD was funded through Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol’s Ysgoloriaeth Ymchwil scheme, which aims to support PhD students in conducting research and writing a thesis through the medium of Welsh.

As part of his study, Owain identified gaps in Welsh scientific terminology.

He worked with terminologists in Bangor to create new terms, and with help from the wider Welsh-speaking chemistry community, Owain added new scientific terms to the Welsh dictionary.

These include:

“damcaniaeth dwysedd ffwythianolion” meaning “density functional theory”'

You’re right but also very few theses are actually read. I know people who have delisted theirs from Google scholar because they had better presentations of the same results published in journals after they defended.

Interesting observation, a language that hasn't evolved (due to lack of demand) to include scientific terms. Speaking zero Welsh I wonder if the choice for "density functional theory" was specifically chosen to sound "Welsh" instead of going for Anglicisation.

Take Romanian, the word for "cheese" goes all the way back to Dacians, but there was no "density functional theory" until rather recently so that was borrowed as "densitate functionala teoretica". Except for declination, basically the foreign words... which might actually be French: "la théorie fonctionnelle de la densité".

I wonder about the computer-related terms in Welsh: copied ad-litteram or adapted? Like English: "software", French-adapted: "douce-article". English: "mouse", French: "souris". Well.. funk me, the French actually say "la souris d'ordinateur"! :)

There's a line in a Bill Bryson book about watching Welsh TV, and noticing they used the english term "dirty weekend", as (allegedly?) the Welsh don't have the concept

What's a dirty weekend?

A couple staying away at a hotel. If they already have kids, the kids are definitely not going.

It’s a semi common term in the UK and would be used casually among friends and close workmates to indicate a short break with just you and your partner.

Ah that explains it, neither heard it in the US or Canada, but I'm not too well versed in British English.

Always important to note that Bill Bryson has no actual training in linguistics, he’s a journalist that has just turned his hand to whatever subject would pay. His book about language The Mother Tongue has a factual error or misunderstanding on nearly every single page.

> density functional theory

The origin of all three words is Latin: density from densitas, functional from functiō, theory from theōria.

Both Romanian and French are Romance languages, i.e. their origin is Latin, and English (a Germanic language) also has strong Latin and French influences, mostly borrowed words like these.

There's a bunch of similar cases, from memory. Hebrew was rekindled in 1940-1950s as a national language for Israel after centuries of mostly being a religious language - needed new words.

Czech, similarly, regained popularity in the nationalist movement of 19th century and invented a bunch of words for concepts introduced in the meantime. To a native Polish speaker, it still sounds very anachronistic.

Navajo code speakers of WWII needed terms for "battleship" and "dive bomber" etc and came up with delightful concepts like "fire canoe" etc.

> “damcaniaeth dwysedd ffwythianolion”

Each of those three words was already a Welsh word - clearly Welsh already has words meaning “density”, “function”, and “theory” - so it seems the innovation is combining them in a new sense rather than making up new words as such.

Indeed, and in a typically Welsh order, which puts the noun "damcaniaeth" (= "theory") first, followed by the adjectives.

I think the innovation is in finding the appropriate Welsh words to represent the concepts involved. I'd imagine that would be easy in many cases, but there may be other scenarios where several words could be used to mean the same concept, and the work is in choosing the most appropriate.

I mean, it happens in software jargon too: most of us have had to name objects <XYZ>Manager/Handler/Executor/Service/etc.

(it's "[density functional] theory" so it would be théorie de la fonctionnelle de la densité, "theory of the density functional", not "functional theory of density")

> "douce-article"

Never seen that, I'm only aware of "logiciel" for software.

True, but at least we invented the equals sign!

In order for a language to be used for science, it has to be made that way. For instance, 150 years ago Afrikaans was considered nothing more than corrupted Dutch. But the Afrikaner nationalists - for all their faults - did put a lot of effort into bringing the language to a similar standard as English: establishing universities, ensuring there was scientific and industrial vocabulary, and so on. They often took the route of coining new words, rather than borrowing from English or Dutch. For instance, a computer in Afrikaans is a rekenaar - which originally meant someone who does calculations (similar to the original meaning of 'computer')

>For instance, a computer in Afrikaans is a rekenaar

In German it's Rechner, meaning the same.

Which in English is reckoner, with related meaning.

Nowadays the momentum for the evolution of Afrikaans has passed from South Africa’s white Afrikaners (who have been shifting to English outside the farming community) to the Coloureds (for whom it serves as an important cornerstone of ethnic identity). Already there has been a lot of complaint that standardized descriptions of Afrikaans fail to account for how the Coloureds use the language, and moreover I’m not sure the Coloureds care so much about Afrikaans as a language of technical description and science, they may be content with an English–Afrikaans diglossia in that regard.

What is very interesting is that prior to the separation of the races around 1950, whites and coloureds spoke the same Afrikaans. I read a paper from 1948 which only looked at the white Afrikaans context, but which mentioned that most white Afrikaners were educated in English and spoke Afrikaans with forms which today would be considered typically coloured - i.e pronouncing the word for hands as 'hanne' instead the way it was spelled 'hande'.

Rekenaar is a German word (Rechner) and simply means computer.

Surely he must have published articles in English.

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