

Why English as the Universal Language of Science Is a Problem for Research - sravfeyn
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/english-universal-language-science-research/400919/?single_page=true

======
A_COMPUTER
When you get down to the meat of the article, all it has is 1) an anecdote
about how some Indonesian tribe has special ways of communicating earthquakes,
extrapolated to a claim that "indigenous knowledge has a lot to offer the
scientific community." 2) that the dominance of English wasn't the case in the
15th through the 17th centuries, never mind that communication between those
science communities in different countries was extremely limited compared
today in large part because of LANGUAGE. 3) the dominance of English has led
to atrophy of scientific terminology in other languages (does there need to be
a Spanish, Chinese word for quark?) 4) it hurts some people's self-esteem
because they're not good at English yet.

This is all pretty petty and extremely unconvincing. There is nothing here
that even remotely makes the case that English is any sort of a problem for
science that wouldn't cause massively bigger problems for science if we went
back to a giant hodgepodge of languages that no single scientist could ever
hope to learn all of to maintain a competence in their field.

------
mahouse
Why Using a Language That Is Common Between All Scientists (Such as English)
Is a Problem for Research

~~~
informatimago
In addition to all the arguments given in the article (go ahead, read it), the
problem is that English is rather defective a language.

~~~
mahouse
Oh, the old "you didn't read it" argument to excuse a horrible article.

