7 ms·

How did science come to speak only English?

29 points by benbreen 12y ago

jwcacces 12y ago
This whole article can be summed up by: * World War II * The Internet
- Thrymr 12y ago
  Except that the process really picked up speed during WWI, and was basically complete before the internet came along.
  - Shivetya 12y 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.
    - Someone 12y ago
      Certainly not before the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster#Safety_response http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster#Saf...) 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_crash#Stress_and_workload_factors http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Polish_Air_Force_Tu-154_...)
sliverstorm 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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!
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        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.
beloch 12y 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!
- TeMPOraL 12y 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.
- Thrymr 12y 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 http://www.un.org/en/aboutun/languages.shtml [1] http://ec.europa.eu/languages/policy/linguistic-diversity/official-languages-eu_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/languages/policy/linguistic-diversity/of... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...
scncs 12y ago
WWII motherfucker
osw 12y ago
"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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
  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.
- dghf 12y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Campbell
dghf 12y 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?
- ashark 12y 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 12y ago
    Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek because Greek was the standard language of philosophy, even well into the days of the Roman Empire.
  - dghf 12y 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 12y 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 http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4963_1.html
b_emery 12y 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-uses-of-us-science-funding http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-sources-and-u...
fan 12y 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?
throwaway_fj4U 12y ago
"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.
lmggyw 12y ago
World War 2, MOTH3RFUKKER!

29 points by benbreen 12y ago

jwcacces 12y ago

This whole article can be summed up by: * World War II * The Internet

Thrymr 12y ago
Except that the process really picked up speed during WWI, and was basically complete before the internet came along.
- Shivetya 12y 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.
  - Someone 12y ago
    Certainly not before the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster#Safety_response http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster#Saf...) 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_crash#Stress_and_workload_factors http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Polish_Air_Force_Tu-154_...)

sliverstorm 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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!
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.

beloch 12y 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!

TeMPOraL 12y 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.
Thrymr 12y 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 http://www.un.org/en/aboutun/languages.shtml [1] http://ec.europa.eu/languages/policy/linguistic-diversity/official-languages-eu_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/languages/policy/linguistic-diversity/of... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...

scncs 12y ago

WWII motherfucker

osw 12y ago

"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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
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.
dghf 12y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Campbell

dghf 12y 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?

ashark 12y 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 12y ago
  Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek because Greek was the standard language of philosophy, even well into the days of the Roman Empire.
- dghf 12y 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 12y 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 http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4963_1.html

b_emery 12y 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-uses-of-us-science-funding http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-sources-and-u...

fan 12y 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?

throwaway_fj4U 12y ago

"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.

lmggyw 12y ago

World War 2, MOTH3RFUKKER!