6 ms·

«English will remain the defacto global Lingua Franca of science.» Just like Latin remained the defacto lingua franca of science? :-)

by mrb 8y ago

jabl 8y ago
We should all switch to Esperanto! :)
- BillChapman 8y ago
  Kial ne uzi Esperanton? Why not use Esperanto?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
yesenadam 8y ago
de facto lingua franca Latin was for hundreds of years, if not longer, and it's still doing OK by the look of it.
rsj_hn 8y ago
Latin was the Lingua Franca of science until the 17th Century, or 1300 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire (Sorry Byzantium), so if that's not evidence for the stickiness of languages, I'm not sure what else you'd need. Wait for 1000 years after the North America, India, Western European civilizations collapse, and we'll see what international language scientists are using -- there's a good chance it will still be English.
- GlobalFrog 8y ago
  One could argue though that we live in highly accelerated times compared to when latin was used. It took quite a long time for the roman language domination to be built : between 509 BC to 480 AD (roman republic and western roman empire), whereas the english dominance came in roughly 70 to 140 years only (depending on the importance you give to the british empire, my opinion being that it is mostly since WW2). So, to sum up, it took around nearly 1000 years for latin to be carved into enough many countries/kingdoms/other entities so that it was used for the next 1300 years in science/church or as the base for the new languages that appeared (and moreover, latin was for quite a long time an official language for the administration). Today, I don't think it will happen, but I wouldn't bet against the possibility it could take only 50 years or less for english to be equaled in global use by another language, because english does not have the same foothold that latin had.
  - rsj_hn 8y ago
    So, I'm not talking about total use. English isn't the most popular first language even today. I'm talking about which language is the most popular second language used in international dialogue, especially research. And the relevant speed there is not population growth but how fast the interconnections and traditions of science change. On the one hand, you have a lot of new scientists coming online, but on the other hand, the bigger the network of scientists, the harder it is to change -- e.g. the lockin effects are bigger. Rather, I think today a lingua franca is much more sticky than it was in the past, when you were talking about scientists from just a handful of nations communicating with each other. It was mostly just Europe and North America. Now, it's global. The best chance of another language displacing english isn't today, it was in the past. Now, even if China, India, and Japan all ban English and adopt, say, Japanese as their Lingua France, the rest of the world will continue with English and they'll be pulled back into the orbit. Also, there is much more trade today than in the past, so you have a network that is bigger and more interconnected, that has settled on a lingua franca, and that system has much more inertia.
    - stickfigure 8y ago
      It's funny that in a startup/techie forum like this, nobody's yet brought up Metcalfe's Law. The network effects of language are incredibly strong, the switching costs are high, and English is well established. It's hard to imagine what could shift this trend, especially to Mandarin. China's population is probably not going to get dramatically larger than the current 1.4 bn, which is only 20% of the world total. Maybe some sort of civilization-destroying world cataclysm like a meteor impact, pandemic, or nuclear warfare. If I could live long enough to see the payout, I'd be willing to bet that far future humans will speak only one language, and that language will have evolved primarily from English.
      - rsj_hn 8y ago
        I also think that the long run future of humanity is speaking a single language. The trend has not been to fragment languages but consolidate them because of the metcalf law effects you pointed out. But even if that language is almost certain to be English, because english changes and has so many loan words, it would probably be unrecognizable to the english we speak today.
- JackFr 8y ago
  > Latin was the Lingua Franca of science until the 17th Century, or 1300 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire That Latin persisted for 1300 hundred years after the fall of Rome has more to do with the Roman Church than the Roman Empire. European universities were essentially religious institutions until the renaissance.
- neuromantik8086 8y ago
  That's a pretty gross oversimplification considering the dominance of Arabic as a scientific language during the Dark Ages (when Europeans preferred burning people to actually thinking). The word "algebra" is definitely not Latin.
  - rsj_hn 8y ago
    That's a gross oversimplification of "dark ages" -- modern historians no longer use that term, because they weren't actually "dark" :) To me, it was a very interesting time. For example, that's the period of time in which we built the most beautiful and livable town squares in the world. Even today, when you go to Europe to visit a city, the city square was probably designed in the middle ages (Paris being a notable exception) and the "old city" dating back to the middle ages, is more beautiful than the newer stuff around it. It was a period of beauty in urban design. Also, the patterns of Feudalism were incredibly stable, compared to previous economic models, so a lot of the rich cultural traditions that were necessary to catapult Europe forward in the Enlightenment were rooted in the middle ages, and wouldn't have existed without Feudalism. If you tried to skip Feudalism and go straight into the 17th Century, Europe would have turned into a horror show -- just think of the French Revolution reign of terror, but assume it just never ends, because at the reciprocal commitments that became established in the middle ages tempered the radicalism of the enlightenment. And although the pace of learning wasn't as fast as before, there were huge advances made in architecture and construction, culminating with the beautiful Gothic Cathedrals that are still wonders today, and survive today. How many buildings built today will stand for 800 years in the same splendor as the Cathedrals built in the middle ages? It was also a time of great flowering of crafts and craftsmen, working in guilds scattered across small city-states and distributed political organizations. Distribution, rather than centralization, was the mantra. For a more nuanced view especially of the cult of crafts, I recommend reading John Ruskin's essay "On the Nature of the Gothic" from his series "The Stones of Venice" http://homes.ieu.edu.tr/arch204/READINGS/02_RUSKIN.pdf http://homes.ieu.edu.tr/arch204/READINGS/02_RUSKIN.pdf
    - sievebrain 8y ago
      The dark ages usually refers to the periods from about 200-1000 AD. The middle ages are usually from about 1000 AD to 1700 AD. And the dark ages aren't called that because human nature was "dark" during that time. They're called that because we know very little about them.
neuromantik8086 8y ago
Latin arguably still ia the lingua franca of science when you look at specialized vocabulary (species taxonomies are the most obvious manifestation of this). Otherwise we'd be calling the outside of the brain "brain bark" instead of "cerebral cortex".

«English will remain the defacto global Lingua Franca of science.» Just like Latin remained the defacto lingua franca of science? :-)

by mrb 8y ago

«English will remain the defacto global Lingua Franca of science.» Just like Latin remained the defacto lingua franca of science? :-)

jabl 8y ago

We should all switch to Esperanto! :)

BillChapman 8y ago
Kial ne uzi Esperanton? Why not use Esperanto?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

yesenadam 8y ago

de facto lingua franca Latin was for hundreds of years, if not longer, and it's still doing OK by the look of it.

rsj_hn 8y ago

Latin was the Lingua Franca of science until the 17th Century, or 1300 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire (Sorry Byzantium), so if that's not evidence for the stickiness of languages, I'm not sure what else you'd need. Wait for 1000 years after the North America, India, Western European civilizations collapse, and we'll see what international language scientists are using -- there's a good chance it will still be English.

GlobalFrog 8y ago
One could argue though that we live in highly accelerated times compared to when latin was used. It took quite a long time for the roman language domination to be built : between 509 BC to 480 AD (roman republic and western roman empire), whereas the english dominance came in roughly 70 to 140 years only (depending on the importance you give to the british empire, my opinion being that it is mostly since WW2). So, to sum up, it took around nearly 1000 years for latin to be carved into enough many countries/kingdoms/other entities so that it was used for the next 1300 years in science/church or as the base for the new languages that appeared (and moreover, latin was for quite a long time an official language for the administration). Today, I don't think it will happen, but I wouldn't bet against the possibility it could take only 50 years or less for english to be equaled in global use by another language, because english does not have the same foothold that latin had.
- rsj_hn 8y ago
  So, I'm not talking about total use. English isn't the most popular first language even today. I'm talking about which language is the most popular second language used in international dialogue, especially research. And the relevant speed there is not population growth but how fast the interconnections and traditions of science change. On the one hand, you have a lot of new scientists coming online, but on the other hand, the bigger the network of scientists, the harder it is to change -- e.g. the lockin effects are bigger. Rather, I think today a lingua franca is much more sticky than it was in the past, when you were talking about scientists from just a handful of nations communicating with each other. It was mostly just Europe and North America. Now, it's global. The best chance of another language displacing english isn't today, it was in the past. Now, even if China, India, and Japan all ban English and adopt, say, Japanese as their Lingua France, the rest of the world will continue with English and they'll be pulled back into the orbit. Also, there is much more trade today than in the past, so you have a network that is bigger and more interconnected, that has settled on a lingua franca, and that system has much more inertia.
  - stickfigure 8y ago
    It's funny that in a startup/techie forum like this, nobody's yet brought up Metcalfe's Law. The network effects of language are incredibly strong, the switching costs are high, and English is well established. It's hard to imagine what could shift this trend, especially to Mandarin. China's population is probably not going to get dramatically larger than the current 1.4 bn, which is only 20% of the world total. Maybe some sort of civilization-destroying world cataclysm like a meteor impact, pandemic, or nuclear warfare. If I could live long enough to see the payout, I'd be willing to bet that far future humans will speak only one language, and that language will have evolved primarily from English.
    - rsj_hn 8y ago
      I also think that the long run future of humanity is speaking a single language. The trend has not been to fragment languages but consolidate them because of the metcalf law effects you pointed out. But even if that language is almost certain to be English, because english changes and has so many loan words, it would probably be unrecognizable to the english we speak today.
JackFr 8y ago
> Latin was the Lingua Franca of science until the 17th Century, or 1300 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire That Latin persisted for 1300 hundred years after the fall of Rome has more to do with the Roman Church than the Roman Empire. European universities were essentially religious institutions until the renaissance.
neuromantik8086 8y ago
That's a pretty gross oversimplification considering the dominance of Arabic as a scientific language during the Dark Ages (when Europeans preferred burning people to actually thinking). The word "algebra" is definitely not Latin.
- rsj_hn 8y ago
  That's a gross oversimplification of "dark ages" -- modern historians no longer use that term, because they weren't actually "dark" :) To me, it was a very interesting time. For example, that's the period of time in which we built the most beautiful and livable town squares in the world. Even today, when you go to Europe to visit a city, the city square was probably designed in the middle ages (Paris being a notable exception) and the "old city" dating back to the middle ages, is more beautiful than the newer stuff around it. It was a period of beauty in urban design. Also, the patterns of Feudalism were incredibly stable, compared to previous economic models, so a lot of the rich cultural traditions that were necessary to catapult Europe forward in the Enlightenment were rooted in the middle ages, and wouldn't have existed without Feudalism. If you tried to skip Feudalism and go straight into the 17th Century, Europe would have turned into a horror show -- just think of the French Revolution reign of terror, but assume it just never ends, because at the reciprocal commitments that became established in the middle ages tempered the radicalism of the enlightenment. And although the pace of learning wasn't as fast as before, there were huge advances made in architecture and construction, culminating with the beautiful Gothic Cathedrals that are still wonders today, and survive today. How many buildings built today will stand for 800 years in the same splendor as the Cathedrals built in the middle ages? It was also a time of great flowering of crafts and craftsmen, working in guilds scattered across small city-states and distributed political organizations. Distribution, rather than centralization, was the mantra. For a more nuanced view especially of the cult of crafts, I recommend reading John Ruskin's essay "On the Nature of the Gothic" from his series "The Stones of Venice" http://homes.ieu.edu.tr/arch204/READINGS/02_RUSKIN.pdf http://homes.ieu.edu.tr/arch204/READINGS/02_RUSKIN.pdf
  - sievebrain 8y ago
    The dark ages usually refers to the periods from about 200-1000 AD. The middle ages are usually from about 1000 AD to 1700 AD. And the dark ages aren't called that because human nature was "dark" during that time. They're called that because we know very little about them.

neuromantik8086 8y ago

Latin arguably still ia the lingua franca of science when you look at specialized vocabulary (species taxonomies are the most obvious manifestation of this). Otherwise we'd be calling the outside of the brain "brain bark" instead of "cerebral cortex".