Posted on 10/12/2014 4:44:03 AM PDT by the scotsman
'Two Norwegian scientists have won the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine - for work published in the English language. Historian of science Michael Gordin explains why they wrote in the language of Dickens and Twain rather than Ibsen and Hamsun.'
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Having to wipe out national Socialists during WWII and Kaiser troops in WWI may have had a tad of an impact.
We brought the best German scientists to the US before and after WW II.
My grandfather majored in chemical engineering at MIT, class of 1922. He had to pass German to graduate. He was not a good student of language, so he worked on a freighter one summer for passage to Hamburg, stayed the summer and picked up enough German to graduate.
A friend received his PhD in chemistry from UCLA in the early 60s. I recall him telling me that at the time, German was a requirement all the way through grad school. I happen to be a biologist, and having a background in Latin was very helpful for me when studying taxonomy. But I had a German colleague tell me once, in her heavy accent, “Your American pronunciation of Latin is all wrong.” I just stared at her...
Because we kicked Germany’s ass twice.
Yea what an interesting article that sort of peters out in the end. Among the things that the article fails to discuss:
1. The role of WWII qw you say, I bet German scientists up through WWII published in German. I know Divisia published in his native French.
2. The role of mathematics or statistics becoming the second or second and third “language” of many disciplines causing them to coalesce around one spoken language.
3. The rises of socialism in Europe slowing down the scientific advances vis-a-vise the US and leading to English as the language of choice of many disciplines.
4. The rise of US research universities and the elitism of European universities leading to a high percentage of doctoral students coming from the US during the period.
5. That English replaced French as the language of international relations is say air traffic control and computer programing in part due to the compact nature of English and maybe science followed.
Now maybe the book covers all of these and other possibilities, but the article as I said makes the case for WWI and then goes nowhere at the end of it.
I wonder if it could have anything to do with the fact that we don’t have mile-long words, and we ditched difficult grammatical concepts like case/noun declension and gender hundreds of years ago.
Didn’t we just, lol.
Wasn’t it fun to beat the Nazis. Bloody good standard of opposition though, made us work for it both times.
I am hoping is you could elaborate on the concept of English being “compact” as compared to French.
Enquiring minds want to know! :o)
Sorry I typed an s rather than an n. Interested minds might well have figured that out. Spelling experts of course just point it out.
Since English is actually a Branch of the German Language perhaps we are all speaking German.
I'd tend to agree. And I'd point to the formation of the Land Grant colleges in the decades after the Civil War, the educational/research institutions founded by the "Robber Barons" such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Stanford, and Mellon, and the great R&D centers for major corporations such a Bell Telephone, Dow Chemical, Standard Oil, GE, Westinghouse etc.
Combined, they concentrated many of the best scientific minds in the world in the US, as well as training new generations of scientists, all using English as a common language.
English is also computer-friendly. English orthography has no diacritical markings unlike German, French and most other European languages.
For most paragraphs the English version is noticeably more compact than the French equivalent.
For one thing, everything in French has a gender. The word is either male or female. Now if you grew up speaking French no problem, but trying to learn French is a little more of a problem. A second reason is that the French “protect” their language from “foreign” words. A lot of English is really foreign words that have been adopted, adapted and changed to fit our needs. The French try to prevent that from happening and will go so far as to create “new” French words rather than accept what is common usage else where.
However, if I would have to decide why English and not something else I would say it was our pop culture. Starting with early movies, to our music and later television.
A Ph.D. from most seminaries still require proficiency in Greek, Hebrew, German and French. In some cases Latin is also required.
No kidding. English is compact and efficient. The perfect language for science.
They don’t have spelling bees in Germany. They don’t have the nutcase words like wind/wind live/live, etc..
If English won out in the science community, it was because of a political battle, not one of reason.
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