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.
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.