Latin, the Enlightenment, and science
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From: Marvin the Martian on 24 Dec 2009 12:58 On Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:05:35 -0800, chazwin wrote: > The 19thC saw the domination of English mainly because nearly all the > decent innovations, discoveries and inventions all came from Britain. > The French and the Germans had to take a back seat. The Germans seemed > to have concentrated on philosophy whilst the French spent the whole > century licking their wounds after the Napoleonic defeats. So, Georg Ohm, Heinrich Hertz, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Clausius, and Heinrich Lenz took a "back seat"? (All big name 19th century German physicist) As did Augustin Fresnel, Pierre Dulong, Alexis Petit, Pierre Curie, and Andre Ampere? (Big name 19th century French Physicist) How... droll. English Chauvinism is not dead. Yes, there is a reason why back in the 1960s you had to be able to read a foreign language, usually German or French, to get a degree in physics at an accredited college in the English speaking United States. And after WW II, the only reason why we had a scientific jump on the Russians is because our captured German scientist were better than the Russian captured German scientists. :-D
From: Hecman Gun on 24 Dec 2009 03:04 There is always no impedement on how the popular culture wants language to be. Without Latin, professional mathematical papers can be made more accessible to the laymen. The problem of communication between different languages is also addressed. While such poses a problem, the evolution of the Internet and the people involved in translating math. papers acts as a greater factor than one international, scholar language. English, like Latin, will wax and wane in some time as Latin did. Therefore, we also see popular culture as a demanding force here as well.
From: nuny on 24 Dec 2009 15:05 On Dec 24, 5:57 am, Andrew Usher <k_over_hb...(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > The use of Latin in the sciences and other learned fields basically > ceased in the 18th and 19th centuries. I have long wondered why people > accepted the use of national languages exclusively in this endeavor > where international understanding is more imperative than any other. Oh, come on, you're claiming there's no nationalism in the sciences? The British Imperial system of units dominated for a long time for practical reasons; those who bought materials for scientific purposes specified quantities in pints, gallons, and cubic feet, hence suppliers stored and packaged them so. That spread to military and industrial usage as well, which is why a U. S. standard pallet at 40 x 48 inches, out of all the other "standard" pallets used worldwide, wastes the least space in a worldwide standard ISO shipping container in these days of otherwise universal metrification. > It is true, that the use of Latin by 1700 had already passed almost > everywhere else, but its last remaining use should still have been > enough to support it, given that Latin was the one language that every > educated man in the Western world knew, and that Latin, having such a > long tradition of use, was at least suitable for scientific and > technical purposes as any other language at the time. That's because the texts the students were learning from were written by people educated in Catholic Church-run schools; you learn the language to read the text, meaning you keep your notes in that as well. However, you write down military applications in your native language. > And so, some explanations suggest themselves. The first is that the > predominant advocates and defenders of Latin, from the Renaissance to > now, are from the humanities; and so once Latin had disappeared from > live literary use, their support was no longer important. The second > is to blame it on the French: they abandoned Latin earlier than anyone > else, and are well-known to have an inflated view of the greatness of > their own language. But that does not seem to explain how it happened > everywhere else: had they wanted to emulate the French, they would > have started writing in French, and if they had wanted to oppose them, > they should have re-emphasised the role of Latin. Nonsense; when the English and German courts started emulating the manners and dress of the French court, they did not start speaking French. Why would they? > Now, of course, I can't propose the revival of Latin for these > purposes: English has virtually replaced it as the international > scientific language. But it look a long time during which dealing with > many different languages was a considerable problem, and it seems as > though this should have been avoided. Speaking of metrification, how soon do you think all goods will be shipped in multiples of li and fenin "new standard" containers, measured in easily remembered whole numbers of li? Yesterday morning I turned on the TV and accidentally selected Nickelodeon, which was running a kids' program called "Ni Hao, Kai Lan" which teaches a different Chinese word each episode. How do you say "get offa my lawn" in Chinese? Oh, wait, when China sells all those Fed bonds, it won't be my lawn... Mark L. Fergerson
From: John Stafford on 24 Dec 2009 15:41 The invention of the printing press, movable type, had been in place for a couple hundred years so that more people could participate in the vernacular. Scholarship was no longer the realm of the Latin affluent.
From: Don Phillipson on 24 Dec 2009 11:36
"Andrew Usher" <k_over_hbarc(a)yahoo.com> wrote in message news:14e01ff9-4a65-4f1b-ab95-ae42d5f55f74(a)r33g2000prh.googlegroups.com... > The use of Latin in the sciences and other learned fields basically > ceased in the 18th and 19th centuries. I have long wondered why people > accepted the use of national languages exclusively in this endeavor > where international understanding is more imperative than any other. Languages were not really considered "national" before the 20th century. E.g. Galileo was the first scientist of lasting historical importance to publish in the vernacular, but this was not because Italian or Tuscan was a "national language:" it was just more convenient for Galileo's current needs. Cf. (a century later) Newton published in both English in 1671 (Fluxions) and 1704 (Optics) and in Latin in 1687 (Princip. Math.) Another century later Alexander von Humboldt chose to publish in French and Latin as well as his native German; another century Einstein published only in German. > It is true, that the use of Latin by 1700 had already passed almost > everywhere else, but its last remaining use should still have been > enough to support it, given that Latin was the one language that every > educated man in the Western world knew, and that Latin, having such a > long tradition of use, was at least suitable for scientific and > technical purposes as any other language at the time. The suitability of Latin to publish genuinely new information is open to challenge. I would suggest Linnaeus's plant catalogue (1753-1779) was the last great attempt to use Latin as the international language of science. He nevertheless had to coin a lot of new words -- and the Linnean System of nomenclature worked in any language, thus did not require Latin for its adoption or use. 20th century scholar Derek de Solla Price was the first to notice the growth pattern of modern science (since Galileo or Newton) -- a tenfold growth in the volume of new knowledge published in each half century. This means the volume of information grew a millionfold in 300 years. During this period investigators have used four successive "languages of science," Latin, French, German and English. I believe the character of languages had less to do with this change than the contingencies of politics, viz. unique features of the German academic system of the 19th century and the American research machine of the 20th. Non-scientists tried to go their own way by maintaining Latin as the core of higher education (e.g. prerequisite for admission to Oxbridge up to about 1960) and from about 1800 adding Greek (which among late Victorians displaced Latin as the preferred language for show-off quotations) and adding to the "research" curriculum a whole lot of Middle Eastern languages reconstructed from writing (also handy for Biblical scholarship, a hot topic i the 19th century) not to mention Persian, Sanskrit, and Chinese and Japanese studies besides. This offered a curriculum that appeared competitive with hot science in the Victorian period -- but which failed to transform the whole world the way science successfully did: and never supported any scholarly lingua franca. -- Don Phillipson Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada) |