How did science come to speak only English?
aeon.co
aeon.co
This is false. If science were still conducted equally in German, Russian, French and English, up and coming scientists in China, Japan, etc. would have to learn four languages to keep up with their field instead of just English. Conversely, assuming such newcomers rise to the forefront of their field, they might choose to publish in their own language, foisting a new language on everyone else.
One aspect of English that the author overlooks completely is how welcoming it is of new words. French, for example, has the "Académie française", which is an institution charged with maintaining the purity of the French language. This means resisting change and controlling the vocabulary in use. There are dictionaries for English, but those who maintain them simply try to keep up with common usage, not control what becomes common usage. If a researcher finds that they need a term that does not exist in English, it's trivial to invent a new word or, more commonly, borrow one from another language.
The author of this article argues that English speaking countries exert undue influence on science because of scientific monolingualism. However, English has been extensively modified to suit those who wield it in print, and an increasing proportion of them are not native speakers of English. English is rapidly becoming the world's language. One could just as easily write an article bemoaning the plight of Anglophones, whose native tongue is no longer something they control!
Absolutely; the combinatorics here are huge. The UN has 6 official languages [0], the EU has 24 [1]. There are ~25 languages in the world with more than 50 million native speakers [2]. Does anyone think that science would be more efficient (or effective) if it had to be continually translated between a similar number of languages?
[0] http://www.un.org/en/aboutun/languages.shtml
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/languages/policy/linguistic-diversity/of...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...
This. It's also one the feature I personally most love in English. In principle, you can invent new words in every language; in practice, not every language culture allows you to do that freely. I like thinking in English because of its flexibility. If I need so, I can e.g. verb a noun on the fly and everyone understands what's going on. Bending the language to better express your thoughts is easier in English than in, say, my native Polish.
So if German has some quality similar to English, that could still be part of what makes a language gain dominance in a field.
I gather that Egyptologists find it extremely convenient (bordering on necessary) to be able to read modern French and German, which are the languages of important Egyptology journals and books. After that Arabic wouldn't hurt, and I'd guess Russian would be nice (less certain on that one). That's in addition to the languages of their primary and contemporary secondary sources, mind you, which are very important but not used to write up new research :-)
Likewise those studying the history or politics of many other regions are aided by knowing French or German or both, plus local and historical languages obviously. In at least some sub-fields of philosophy I'd expect French, and maybe other languages, to be practically a requirement for keeping up with new work and developments.
Many native English-speaking economists and political scientists likely did benefit or could have benefited from being able to read French for Piketty's book, which didn't reach the English language until months later.
I don't know what effects, positive or negative, this has on the people who work in those fields.
I don't understand this argument. Ok, so you have to train half the world in a non-native language. That's not free. But what's the alternative? Training the whole world in two to three non-native languages? (Thinking of the German/French/English polyglot system)
Am I missing something? What is the superior alternative? Short of the Hitchhiker's Guide babel fish, of course.
Scientists could write their science in any of the higher level representation languages, or even Esperanto or Lojban, or whatever they culturally prefer for their particular brand of science. As a bonus, you could even use the Vernacular Metatranslator optimizers to tighten up prose even if it was originally written in your preferred output language!
In most languages, word for word translation produces rubbish. In Esperanto it doesn't.
Esperanto has no particular word order, instead, suffixes denotes parts of speech. This alone makes it much more simple to translate literally between languages. It also has no gender, and is perfectly regular.
The language was designed so that one could send a letter to a friend who with did not speak it, and they could translate the entire document quickly using only a dictionary and a basic understanding of the grammar.
Training the whole world in an artificial language like Esperanto. On one hand, this has a cost now even English speaking people have to learn a second language, on the other hand an artificial language is MUCH easier to learn than our 'natural' languages with all their inconsistencies..
This seems to be the main thesis the article is trying to prove, yet there's no real clear analysis of the actual tradeoffs.
The argument that having multiple languages has some vague "multi-cultural" advantage over a single unique language is far from evident. The only real argument I can think of distills down to a sense of inequality that some people have 100% of major science article written in their native tongue (English), and all others have 0%.
The segway into the long history of languages in science seems like a non-sequitur for the article key thesis. But it does bring up a point that seems interesting: if one language is so efficient why did scientists fail to coordinate for so long?
"In absolute terms, U.S. spending on R&D far exceeds that of any other country: in current dollars, the United States spent $401.6 billion in 2009, more than twice as much as the second-highest R&D investor, China, which spent $154.1 billion." [1]
I've seen a lot of people who learned english because they want to come to the US to do science, because that's where they are more likely to get funded.
[1] http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-sources-and-u...
* World War II
* The Internet
Likely the condition the article is about will remain for some time. Many harp on the need for one language, if not one government. The language likely will be a mashup of english, spanish, and others, with heavy emphasis on the first. Words that don't translate easily but convey great meaning will remain in native form. Then again perhaps I watched Blade Runner too many times.
Theory isn't practice, though. For instance, language problems are thought to have been a factor in the 2010 crash that killed the Polish president (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Polish_Air_Force_Tu-154_...)
Wasn't Caesar's preferred language Greek?
Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations in Greek. I can't think of any other major Roman figures who are known for writing in anything other than Latin. Plutarch did, but he was Greek so I don't think he counts.
I can't provide a source, but I was under the distinct impression that the Roman patrician class spoke Greek among themselves in private: Latin was for formal, public and ceremonial use. Suetonius says that Caesar's last words were in Greek (rather than the "Et tu, Brute?" that Shakespeare gives).
Did it really? In a place for discussion exclusively in English, someone references an article that claims English as defining the universe of scientific communication. Let's complete this a bit in order to make a little more sense, shall we? English is the language of anglophone universe of scientific communication, where by definition, every piece of science communication that's not in English is automatically neglected and the claim stands as tautology. Every further debate in English about English is weird, to say the least.
Personally, I wish the world language was Indonesian.
Though I would need to brush up, if that suddenly became true :)
I wanted my friends and myself to learn this in college, to have a quasi-secret language that also allows a stepping stone to native languages like Spanish and Italian.
The things that are "worth keeping" are always translated in more than one language. As for the "cultural protectionism" link, someone tries to sell the progress along with English in one package. But neither English, nor any other language for that matter, owns the progress.