Is That a Fish in Your Ear - By Bellos, David Page 0,4
in this new arrangement gives an interesting map of where science is now done.
The reasons for English having made a clean sweep of the sciences are not straightforward. Among them we cannot possibly include the unfortunate but widespread idea that English is simpler than other languages.
However, you can’t explain the history and present state of the language of science as the direct result of economic and military might, either. In three instances, languages became science vehicles because the work of a single individual made advances that could not be ignored anywhere else in the world (Liebig for German, Berzelius for Swedish, Mendeleyev for Russian). One language lost its role because of the political folly of its users (German). What we seem to have experienced is not a process of language imposition but of language elimination, in a context where the scientific community needs a means of global communication among its members. The survivor language, English, is not necessarily the best suited to the job; it’s just that nothing has yet happened to knock it out.
One result of the spread of English is that most of the English now spoken and written in the world comes from people who do not possess it natively, making “English speakers” a minority among the users of the language. Much of the English now written by natural and social scientists whose native language is other is almost impenetrable to nonspecialist readers who believe that because they are native English speakers they should be able to understand whatever is written in English. So clumsy and “deviant” is international scientific English that even nonnative wits can have fun with it:
Recent observations by Unsofort & Tchetera pointing out that “the more you throw tomatoes on Sopranoes, the more they yell” and comparative studies dealing with the gasp-reaction (Otis & Pifre, 1964), hiccup (Carpentier & Fialip, 1964), cat purring (Remmers & Gautier, 1972), HM reflex (Vincent et al., 1976), ventriloquy (McCulloch et al., 1964), shriek, scream, shrill and other hysterical reactions (Sturm & Drang, 1973) provoked by tomato as well as cabbages, apples, cream tarts, shoes, buts and anvil throwing (Harvar & Mercy, 1973) have led to the steady assumption of a positive feedback organization of the YR based upon a semilinear quadristable multi-switching interdigitation of neuronal sub-networks functioning en desordre (Beulott et al., 1974).7
Pastiche and parody notwithstanding, international scientific English serves an important purpose—and it would barely exist if it did not serve well enough the purposes for which it is used. It is, in a sense, an escape from translation (even if in many of its uses it is already translated from the writer’s native tongue). Now, if the natural and social sciences can achieve a world language, however clumsy it may sound, why should we not wish all other kinds of human contact and interchange to arrive at the same degree of linguistic unification? In the middle of the last century, the critic and reformer I. A. Richards believed with great passion that China could become part of the concert of nations only if it adopted an international language, Basic English, standing for “British-American-Scientific-International-Commercial English” (as its name suggests, it consists of a simplified English grammar and a limited vocabulary suited for technical and commercial use). Richards devoted much of his energy in the second half of his life to devising, promoting, teaching, and propagandizing on behalf of this utopian language of contact between East and West. He was in a way following in the footsteps of Lejzer Zamenhof, a Jewish intellectual from Bia-łystok (now in Poland), who had also invented a language of hope, Esperanto, which he believed would rid the world of the muddles and horrors caused by multiple tongues. In the nineteenth century, in fact, international languages were invented in great number, in proportion to the rise of language-based national independence movements in Europe. All have disappeared for practical purposes, except Esperanto, which continues to be used as a language of culture by perhaps a few hundred thousand people scattered across the globe—though what they use it for most of all is not science or commerce but to translate poetry, drama, and fiction from vernacular languages for the benefit of other Esperantists around the world.
Modern Europeans seem to be haunted by a folk memory of the role of Latin in the Middle Ages and beyond. But Latin itself has continued to have a limited use as an international medium for the speakers of “small” European languages. Antanas Smetona, the last president of Lithuania