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If you can read this sentence, you can talk with a scientist. Well,
maybe not about the details of her research, but at least you would
share a common language. The overwhelming majority of
communication in the natural sciences today physics, chemistry,
biology, geology takes place in English; in print and at
conferences, in emails and in Skype-mediated collaborations,
confirmable by wandering through the halls of any scientific
research facility in Kuala Lumpur or Montevideo or Haifa.
Contemporary science is Anglophone.
from Arabic into Latin helped birth the revival of learning in the
West. Learning, learned people knew, was a multilingual enterprise.
Latin became a fitting vehicle for claims about universal nature. But
everyone in this conversation was polyglot
So was life. Aside from the rare oddball with overzealous parents
(Montaigne claimed to be one), no one learned Latin as a first
language and few used it orally. Latin was for written scholarship,
but everyone who used it such as Erasmus of Rotterdam
deployed it alongside other languages that they used to
communicate with servants, family members and patrons. Latin was
a vehicular language, used to bridge linguistic communities, and it
was understood as more or less neutral. It excluded on class lines,
to be sure, since it demanded more education, but it crossed
confessional and political divides easily: Protestants used it
frequently (often more elegantly than Catholics), and it was even
imported as late as the 18th century into Orthodox Russia as the
scholarly language of the newly established St Petersburg Academy
of Sciences.
This system started to break down in the 17th century, in the midst
of, and as an essential part of, what was once dubbed the scientific
revolution. Galileo Galilei published his discovery of the moons of
Jupiter in the Latin Sidereus Nuncius of 1610, but his later major
works were in Italian. As he aimed for a more local audience for
patronage and support, he switched languages.
Newtons Principia (1687) appeared in Latin, but his Opticks of 1704
was English (Latin translation 1706).
After the war, the International Research Council, formed under the
aegis of the victorious Entente now including the US but excluding
Russia, which had descended into the maelstrom of the Bolshevik
Revolution initiated a boycott of scientists from the Central
Powers. New international institutions for science were erected in
the early 1920s locking out the defeated Germanophone scientists.
This exclusion lit a long-delay fuse that, in the coming decades,
would contribute to the death of German as a leading scientific
language. Three languages had, for part of Europe, diminished to
two. Germans responded to their predicament by reinvigorating
their commitment to their native language. The multilingual system
was beginning to crack, but it was the Americans who would shatter
it.
The gradient of travel soon went the other way. In 1933, Adolf Hitler
summarily fired non-Aryan and Left-leaning professors, devastating
German science. Those Jewish scientists who were lucky enough to
emigrate in the 1930s faced a number of challenges. Cornelius
Lanczos, one of Albert Einsteins former assistants, had difficulty
publishing in English both because of his topic and because of the
well-known excuse of bad language, even though he had
subject[ed] the text to a thorough revision with good friends. Even
Einstein relied on translators and collaborators.
After the Second World War, the story increasingly becomes one of
demographics and geopolitics. In contrast to the comparatively
plurilingual approach of the sprawling British empire during the 19th
century, scientists from the rising American empire of the 20th were
not expected to acquire competence in foreign languages. The
massive bulk of Soviet scientists and engineers that rose up after
the war, however, presented the US with a new scientific competitor.
In the 1950s and 60s, with about 25 per cent of world publication,
Russian became the second most dominant scientific language,
trailing the 60 per cent of English. But by the 1970s the percentage
of Russian publications began to drop as scientists worldwide blazed
the trail to Anglophonia.