On the lingua franca of science issue, I get the impression that for scientific careers over the last few generations, going out of one’s way to learn foreign languages to read/communicate with non-English-speakers seems to have become less prevalent, rather than more, among English speakers.
For instance, mandatory foreign language requirements in US PhD programs are rarer and rarer (perhaps only in elite schools, and more or more restricted to humanities, not STEM) for fields like hard science.
Of course this is in comparison to and a holdover from when non-English European languages like French, German, Russian etc. made up a larger share of the scientific literature in past generations if not centuries, and may not apply to the rise of Asia.
But I do wonder, has the relative importance in science from the rise of China or Asia (let’s say when Japan rose to prominence last generation or two ago) convinced more people to learn non-western languages in the same way people did with French, German, Russian ec. when continental Europe was a scientific center, that can be seen in language learning trends?
Most discussion of language learning centers around business, international relations, geopolitical stuff, with science relatively little discussed but that might be because scientists make up only a small proportion of the populace.
It’s worth noting that Chinese is an impractical language for science. When coining a new term in English a reader has a good idea of how to pronounce it while the same isn’t true in Chinese as far as I understand.
Given the political enviroment in China, the government howerver can decide to set standards even if those aren’t good. Wouldn’t be the first time that internal politics reduced China’s technological capacity ;)
Historically, yes, it has been hard to figure out how to pronunciation scientific neologisms in Chinese. (The Periodic Tables of the Elements is especially full of unique characters.) These days, I don’t think that is much of an issue. If you coin a new term from commonly-used characters then its pronunciation tends to be obvious. For example, 高能加速器 (high-energy particle accelerator) is composed entirely of well-known characters with single pronunciations.
High energy particle accelerator is a phrase that’s made up out of other building blocks. A word like entropy on the other hand isn’t.
I don’t think we are at a time where everything that could be discovered on a basic level has words. New scientific paradigms usually need new words and for a Chinese research community to form, funding a community to gather around a new paradigm would be a way to do it.
On the lingua franca of science issue, I get the impression that for scientific careers over the last few generations, going out of one’s way to learn foreign languages to read/communicate with non-English-speakers seems to have become less prevalent, rather than more, among English speakers.
For instance, mandatory foreign language requirements in US PhD programs are rarer and rarer (perhaps only in elite schools, and more or more restricted to humanities, not STEM) for fields like hard science.
Of course this is in comparison to and a holdover from when non-English European languages like French, German, Russian etc. made up a larger share of the scientific literature in past generations if not centuries, and may not apply to the rise of Asia.
But I do wonder, has the relative importance in science from the rise of China or Asia (let’s say when Japan rose to prominence last generation or two ago) convinced more people to learn non-western languages in the same way people did with French, German, Russian ec. when continental Europe was a scientific center, that can be seen in language learning trends?
Most discussion of language learning centers around business, international relations, geopolitical stuff, with science relatively little discussed but that might be because scientists make up only a small proportion of the populace.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1089 is a paper that describes language distribution in scientific papers and the share of non-English papers is currently falling. Knowing non-English languages falls in importance for science.
It’s worth noting that Chinese is an impractical language for science. When coining a new term in English a reader has a good idea of how to pronounce it while the same isn’t true in Chinese as far as I understand.
Given the political enviroment in China, the government howerver can decide to set standards even if those aren’t good. Wouldn’t be the first time that internal politics reduced China’s technological capacity ;)
Historically, yes, it has been hard to figure out how to pronunciation scientific neologisms in Chinese. (The Periodic Tables of the Elements is especially full of unique characters.) These days, I don’t think that is much of an issue. If you coin a new term from commonly-used characters then its pronunciation tends to be obvious. For example, 高能加速器 (high-energy particle accelerator) is composed entirely of well-known characters with single pronunciations.
High energy particle accelerator is a phrase that’s made up out of other building blocks. A word like entropy on the other hand isn’t.
I don’t think we are at a time where everything that could be discovered on a basic level has words. New scientific paradigms usually need new words and for a Chinese research community to form, funding a community to gather around a new paradigm would be a way to do it.