How did science come to speak only English?

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/how-did-science-come-to-speak-only-english/

by benbreen • 11 years ago

29 34 11 years ago

aeon.co

jwcacces• 11 years ago

This whole article can be summed up by:

* World War II

* The Internet

Thrymr2• 11 years ago

Except that the process really picked up speed during WWI, and was basically complete before the internet came along.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

When did flight control go all English? A large amount of it is conducted in English.

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.

sliverstorm• 11 years ago

it takes a lot of energy to maintain a monoglot system on such a scale, with enormous resources poured into language training and translation in non-Anglophone countries.

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.

wanderingstan• 11 years ago

Exactly. And all the inefficiencies that come from multiple "target" languages. What happens when the Indinesian scientist decides to learn German and Chinese, while the Latvian scientist learns Spanish and English. They've both taken the effort to learn 2 languages and yet still won't be able read each other's papers. It's just simpler to have one target where you know everyone else is aiming too.

arjunnarayan• 11 years ago

Obviously we need an intermediate representation language, which we could hypothetically call "Language and Lexicon for Vernacular Metatranslation". From this language, we could generate automatic translators to and from various target languages, including English, French, and so on. What would be useful is that we could then write reusable prose tightening tools in the Language and Lexicon for Vernacular Metatranslation that could be shared across all the target languages.

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!

renox• 11 years ago

But what's the alternative?

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..

beloch• 11 years ago

"the majority of scientists working today are actually not native English speakers. When you consider the time spent by them on language-learning, the English-language conquest is not more efficient than polyglot science – it is just differently inefficient. "

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!

TeMPOraL4• 11 years ago

One aspect of English that the author overlooks completely is how welcoming it is of new words.

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.

Thrymr2• 11 years ago

"scientists in China, Japan, etc. would have to learn four languages to keep up with their field instead of just English."

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...

bad_alloc• 11 years ago

I'm not sure it's that, because German adapts to new concepts easily by simply concatenating old ones. The most popular example is probably "Doppelkupplungsgetriebe", which stands for dual-clutch transmission. This means you can get along with a few primitives but on the other hand you get some obscenely long words. You find a lot of those in the legal sector, like "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" which was the name of an actual law controlling how beef is labeled.

WildUtah• 11 years ago

German -- especially in organic chemistry -- is one of the very last languages that still maintains dominance in the face of English in a major scientific discipline.

So if German has some quality similar to English, that could still be part of what makes a language gain dominance in a field.

ashark2• 11 years ago

Some areas of the humanities aren't settled on English as their only language.

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.

osw• 11 years ago

"Anything worth keeping will be translated into English. "

http://harmful.cat-v.org/society/cultural_protectionism

throwaway_fj4U2• 11 years ago

"Anything worth keeping will be translated into English."

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.

ArtDev• 11 years ago

Regardless how you feel about it, it is the world language. We need a world language.

Personally, I wish the world language was Indonesian.

Though I would need to brush up, if that suddenly became true :)

worklogin• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

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.

dghf3• 11 years ago

Neo-Melanesian Pidgin English, as pushed for by the late Ken Campbell [1] under the banner "Wol Wantok" (lit. "world one-talk", i.e. "global single language").

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Campbell

dghf3• 11 years ago

"Until the first third of the 19th century, many learned elites still opted for Latin. (The German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss kept his scholarly notebooks, at least through the 1810s, in the same language Julius Caesar used for his.)"

Wasn't Caesar's preferred language Greek?

ashark2• 11 years ago

He wrote his accounts of his wars in Latin, at least.

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.

philwelch• 11 years ago

Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek because Greek was the standard language of philosophy, even well into the days of the Roman Empire.

dghf3• 11 years ago

The Meditations were Marcus Aurelius's private jottings, so parallel to the "scholarly notebooks" of Caesar that the article refers to: De bello gallica &c. were for public consumption.

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).

Gravityloss• 11 years ago

Eugene Wigner's oral history transcript is really interesting to read as it's straight from someone who was in the pre-war physics scene in Europe. If those people had not been able to transfer to Princeton, the world might be a very different place.

http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4963_1.html

b_emery• 11 years ago

I'm guessing this is the answer (apologies if I missed it in the article):

"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...

fan• 11 years ago

"English-language conquest is not more efficient than polyglot science – it is just differently inefficient."

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?