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.
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.