From a footnote on page 69 of Seth Lloyd’s new book Programming the Universe (about which more later):
I happened to be in [Nobel Laureate Norman Ramsey’s office in Paris] when two members of the Academie Francaise came to call. “Why, Professeur Ramsey,” they inquired, “is French not the international language of Science?” Ramsey immediately answered them in his fluent French, with a thick midwestern accent. Horrified, they dropped the subject. In fact, the French Academy of Sciences caused the adoption of English as the international language of science in the seventeenth century by being the first national academy to abandon the previous international language, Latin, and publish their proceedings in their own language. The English and the Germans followed suit. The rest is just an accident of history.
Examine any collection of simultaneous translations of a substantial text. The shortest rendering in a latinate alphabet is invariably in English – no diacritical marks, either. With a common vocabulary of about 250K words and another 250K of technical words across th spectrum, well-used English is unexcelled at exact, unambiguous, terse knowledge conveyance.
If you want uncontrolled slop, length, and ambiguity (e.g., diplomacy), conduct the proceedings in French. Anybody can rhyme in a Romance language. Put your back into it! Go rhyme, oh… silver, orange (“salver” and “lozenge” are insufficient), angst, baggage, breadth, bulb, chimney, dangerous, film, garbage, luggage, marathon, month, ninth, oblige, opus, pint, pizza, purple, reptile, sculpts, serpent, width, wolf…
Simon Winchester’s excellent work – The Meaning of Everything: The Story of The Oxford English Dictionary – offers a brief historial account on the evolution of the English language and the development of the Oxford Dictionary. Simon Winchester reveals that English – unlike French – is a more dynamic language. The architects of the Oxford Dictionary were cognizant of the highly dynamic nature of the English language. Consequently, these lexicologists embraced the English language’s propensity to be more open to change as well as more receptive to outside influences from other languages. In contrast, the lexicologists for the official French Dictionary were more concerned with preserving French linguistic purity, in turn, more concerned with preventing the French language from being contaminated by outside languages. In effect, this is one reason English (as opposed to French) was in a better position to flourish as a universal language. This brief synopsis of Great Britian’s rather open treatment of language versus France’s rather closed treatment of language might partially explain why the French Acedemy of Sciences adopted English (as opposed to French) as the international language of science. Being somewhat of a popular science junky, I look to read Seth Lloyd’s “Programming The Universe.” Thanks for bringing this work to my attention.
Oh, please. The reason English is now the language of science is the economic and political dominance of the US in western Europe since 1945. Maybe it wasn’t hurt by the stigma (now long gone) attached to speaking the previous language of science — German. English is the only language I speak competently, and I love it dearly, but to suggest it’s in some way inherently better for scientific communication than some other *very* closely related language is just silly.
Bon jour, I happened to sit at the same table with Prof. Ramsey today during the lunch in the faculty club.
America plus England have ruled the world, especially after the war (when America has also absorbed a lot of scientists from Europe), which is why they determine the language of science. When I was submitting my diploma from Prague to the Rutgers offices, they forced me to prepare a translation to English because the diploma was written in an apparent non-language, namely Latin. 😉
Town Hall
http://upcoming.org/event/66200/
I know Intelligent design is a issue here, and the idea of the language spoken must be hiding somewhere for the grand entry of what’s to come next? 🙂
English is likely the most expressive language, if that means anything, just because of the number of words (~500k nontechnical words, significantly more than any other language (but the only comparison number I remember is something like 150k for french)). It’s not like it matters for science writing, though, because most scientists are pretty sucky writers anyway and don’t need more than a handful non-technical words to make their point =). And in any case, as others have asserted, the reasons english was adopted were just WWII etc (historical accident).
During the industrial revolution, the French spear headed the universal system of weights and measure. In contrast, the British – through means of Empire – globally disseminated the English language making English the universal language. Following the aftermath of the second world war, Great Britain past its “torch of Empire” to its most obvious successor, the United States. Because two back-to-back English speaking Empires came into recent historial existence, the English language continues to be the universal language. I image one can sense that I have read Niall Ferguson’s “Empire.” However, the fundamental question should not be why English (as opposed to German) became the universal language. The fundamental question should be why English (as opposed to French) became the universal lauguage. while Germany obviously lost the second war, France and England equally won the second war.
Not to be argumentati ve, but France was occupied — conquered — during the Second World War. It was then liberated by its own forces, led by those of the U.S., the U.K., and the then British Empire (i.e., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc.), and the free forces of Poland and other European states.
I don’t think that France and England *equally* won the Second World War.
In the sixteenth/seventeenth century, Simon Stevin (a contemporary of Christiaan Huygens) proposed to use Dutch as the universal language of science (this was not as ridiculous then as it would be now). To this end, he introduced over 300 scientific terms into the Dutch language that replace the original latin-based terms. And the funny thing is that we still use them today. For example, equilibrium became “even-weight” (evenwicht) and mathematics became wiskunde. Here, wis means “certain”, and kunde means “body of knowledge”.
David Mussington, you are right. I wrongfully described France as a victor of the war. In actuality, France was simply liberated from occupation. However, the point of this post is to explain why France – by the seventeeth century – adopted English as the international language for the sciences. In his work “The Meaning of Everything,” Simon Winchester briefly touches on the general difference between the British authorities approach to overseeing the English language versus the French authorities approach to overseeing the French language. The “language police” of England tended to be more lenient about accepting outside influences from other languages. In contrast, the “language police” of France tended to be less lenient about accepting outside influenced from other languages. Therefore, I will speculate the follow. Due to the more openness of the English language in comparison to the more closeness of the French language, English – rather than French – was in a better position to become an international language for the sciences.
I am sure that you are incorrect. The most used language in science internationally is… mathematics of course!
C++ is the language of physics.
We can all be grateful that it’s no longer FORTRAN.
I wouldn’t be surprised if C# replaces C++; it’s a little slower, but it’s easier to write.
On the main topic, wasn’t Descartes the pioneer of writing a learned tome (his Meditations) in native language. I think that Meditations had two versions (the other, of course, in Latin).
The greatest impact of French on ‘academic’ English is seen in that deployed in ‘Science Wars’ where, as the ever insightful Uncle Al has it, ‘ uncontrolled slop, length, and ambiguity ‘ are at a premium
Adam,
Speaking of math in the .NET Framework classes and the CLR, see this post by Wesner Moise.
In a response to comment#11: I do not question the fact that math is the universal language. The question is: outside of math, why is English considered to be the universal language for the sciences?
In order to balance out all the anglo-franco assertions being bandied around here, I will present a quote (origins known to most) :
I like chinese,
I like chinese,
There’s nine hundred million of them in the world today,
You’d better learn to like them, that’s what I say.
Eugene: Doubtlessly, you are correct! As English replaced Latin as the universal language for the sciences. Chinese could be next to replace English as the universal language for the sciences. As great Empires rise and fall, so do universal languages rise and fall. Off to the library to check-out Seth Lloyd’s “Programming The Universe.”
Chris, that was interesting. But they’re making progress! The MS complex libraries for c++ didn’t entirely work, on the version that I had (although all such irritations were eclipsed by the annoyance of dealing with the ridiculous scoping behaviour of local variables).
I guess that, over time, there will be enough library stuff available for some proper mathematical programming, even if only through contributions by enthusiasts (which reminds me to check on how mono is doing).
Adam– there are some of us, who are in no way old, who think that FORTRAN is an immeasurably better language for physics than C++.
You people will burn in the fiery pits of hell.
Not that I’ve ever used FORTRAN 90. It was 77 that I learnt. If I was teaching physics undergrads a language, though, I think that I’d be doing them more of a service in general to teach them c++ (or even, ick, Java).
The math, science, and grid libraries for python are now pretty mature, and it’s much easier for a non-professional programmer (and that definitely includes most physicists…) to write good python code than C++. For numerical work, it’s only slightly slower because the numerics code itself runs at the speed of compiled C, and the development time is much shorter.
You have to go back to less respectable types like Paracelsus (he of the iatrochemistry) to understand the urge to move from Latin to the vernacular (German, in his case) as the language of science. PK is right that Stevin’s talent for scientific neologism could well have had a much greater influence — should we blame it all on the Spanish Habsburgs mucking up the Low Countries? And Galileo certainly did a great deal to make a scientific vernacular credible in his day.
I’d be inclined to lean heavily on the element of historical contingency here. The labile vocabulary or simpler grammar of English were not sufficient to displace French (earlier) or German (later). Many pre-war non-native German-speaking scientists were perfectly reasonable in regarding that language as somehow more precise in expression, and thus preferable as the language of science, if not the lingua franca.
So, are there any practical advantages to adopting an ideographic language like Chinese, or are these simply demographic arguments? I suspect English will remain the language of international science even as the American empire declines.
I say Mathematica, Fortran, and LaTeX is all a scientist needs.
Oh, and a bit of HTML.
There’s a bunch of python enthusiasts in my building, although IDL is the most popular language, I would say (and sounds like FORTRAN, with extra picture goodness, to me).
Just for writing general code, I actually like C#. Although writing in a language with reference types AND garbage collection still makes me a bit queasy.
On the subject of English and science, I reckon that it’s largely chance, too (in the sense that it’s not been picked on its intrinsic merits for communicating science). Lucky for me, as I blow when it comes to learning languages, although I have some facility with science.