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When using a language none of us speaks we can truly be equals. Discussing with e.g people who are the product of English boarding schools, they always have th

When using a language none of us speaks we can truly be equals. Discussing with e.g people who are the product of English boarding schools, they always have the home field advantage.

dlisboa 2y ago
> When using a language none of us speaks we can truly be equals. It's the opposite: having a preferred "high language" for science means it's gatekept by people who have the means to learn it. Those people will have the home field advantage, much like it was for much of history. Plus it's just a bad idea. Firstly, it'll take more time for young students to learn to read a scientific paper. Second, you significanly diminish the pool of thinkers and therefore scientists, you're basically making 99% of the population illiterate. Finally there will always be more people willing to communicate in the "vulgar" language and it's where all new vocabulary will be created, which is why every single high language has pretty much died off except in cerimonial contexts. English is just the language du jour, before that it was French, German in some fields, Arabic, Latin, Greek, etc.
leoc 2y ago
Latin does give a significant advantage to Romance-language speakers, and anyway trying to make everyone equally bad at the common language is a bit procrustean. The big disadvantage to the decline of Latin (which is probably mostly something that took place in the eighteenth century) is that it fragmented western Europe's academic writing. So without Latin you can't read Thomas Aquinas or Thomas Hobbes' De cive or John Napier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIwCOevUew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIwCOevUew in the original; or often at all, as a great deal has never been translated while some translations aren't of the best quality. And even with Latin and English you can't read the enormous amount of important material which has been published in (particularly) French and German, especially up to about WWII.
woodruffw 2y ago
Being equally bad at speaking Latin seems like a strictly worse outcome than having a mix of L1 and L2 speakers. (I studied Latin for about a decade.)

When using a language none of us speaks we can truly be equals. Discussing with e.g people who are the product of English boarding schools, they always have the home field advantage.

dlisboa 2y ago

> When using a language none of us speaks we can truly be equals. It's the opposite: having a preferred "high language" for science means it's gatekept by people who have the means to learn it. Those people will have the home field advantage, much like it was for much of history. Plus it's just a bad idea. Firstly, it'll take more time for young students to learn to read a scientific paper. Second, you significanly diminish the pool of thinkers and therefore scientists, you're basically making 99% of the population illiterate. Finally there will always be more people willing to communicate in the "vulgar" language and it's where all new vocabulary will be created, which is why every single high language has pretty much died off except in cerimonial contexts. English is just the language du jour, before that it was French, German in some fields, Arabic, Latin, Greek, etc.

leoc 2y ago

Latin does give a significant advantage to Romance-language speakers, and anyway trying to make everyone equally bad at the common language is a bit procrustean. The big disadvantage to the decline of Latin (which is probably mostly something that took place in the eighteenth century) is that it fragmented western Europe's academic writing. So without Latin you can't read Thomas Aquinas or Thomas Hobbes' De cive or John Napier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIwCOevUew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIwCOevUew in the original; or often at all, as a great deal has never been translated while some translations aren't of the best quality. And even with Latin and English you can't read the enormous amount of important material which has been published in (particularly) French and German, especially up to about WWII.

woodruffw 2y ago

Being equally bad at speaking Latin seems like a strictly worse outcome than having a mix of L1 and L2 speakers. (I studied Latin for about a decade.)