Hacker News Reader

Comment by kome | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com