
How did science come to speak only English? - benbreen
http://aeon.co/magazine/science/how-did-science-come-to-speak-only-english/
======
beloch
"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!

~~~
bad_alloc
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
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.

------
sliverstorm
_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
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
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!

~~~
TeMPOraL
Except, unfortunately, natural languages don't really work this way. There's
so much additional information spliced in phrases, constructs, choice of
words, tone, etc. that building this Vernacular Metatranslator is an GAI-
complete task. At this point we're back in the Babelfish territory. Not saying
it's impossible, but we seem to be far from required technology level to do
that.

~~~
gwern
But you know, this is how the recent work on deep networks for translating
work and why they deliver such nice results: you have two recurrent neural
networks, joined together in the middle.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You mean human brains, of course?

~~~
gwern
No? I mean deep neural networks.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Sorry. I wasn't sure if "two recurrent neural networks, joined together in the
middle" was something in DNN research (I'm not very up to date with the
current state of it) or an euphemism for human brain (sarcasm sometimes comes
in very subtle forms here on HN).

------
fan
"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?

------
b_emery
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...](http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-sources-and-uses-of-
us-science-funding)

------
jwcacces
This whole article can be summed up by:

* World War II

* The Internet

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

~~~
Shivetya
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.

~~~
Someone
Certainly not before the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster
([http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster#Saf...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster#Safety_response))

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_...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Polish_Air_Force_Tu-154_crash#Stress_and_workload_factors))

------
Gravityloss
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](http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4963_1.html)

------
dghf
"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?

~~~
ashark
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.

~~~
dghf
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).

------
throwaway_fj4U
"How did science come to speak only English?"

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.

------
ArtDev
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
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua](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.

------
lmggyw
World War 2, MOTH3RFUKKER!

------
osw
"Anything worth keeping will be translated into English. "

[http://harmful.cat-v.org/society/cultural_protectionism](http://harmful.cat-v.org/society/cultural_protectionism)

~~~
throwaway_fj4U
"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.

