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ScienceWeek
SCIENCE POLICY: ON LANGUAGE IN SCIENCE
The following points are made by Scott Montgomery (Science 2004 303:1333):
1) Science, it appears, has come to a historical crossroads. On the one hand, it would seem to have completed the Tower of Babel, its knowledge now reaching far beyond the heavens and, through the global spread of English, recovering the ancient dream of a single language for the wisdom of the nations. Yet, from another vantage, the very opposite is suggested: this great tower of unanimity broken and rebuilt into a thousand walls by the power of jargon, dividing the disciplines by the arcanity of specialist speech. Two great trends of opposing force, two linguistic movements that annul each other's action. Is such a state of affairs real, and is it prevalent? What do the facts say, as far as we can discern them, and what are their implications?
2) These are not mere academic questions. Scientific knowledge exists because scientists are writers and speakers, users and sharers of language that, like all language, is constantly evolving. Words are the primary medium by which technical work is embodied, added to the corpus of professional understanding, and passed on. Whatever directly affects the speech of science and its development affects scientific endeavor near its core -- its ability to express and render available its nuclear substance.
3) How true is the claim that English constitutes an international language for science, an ever-expanding one? The answer is "very true", indeed, but with certain limits and qualifications. Dominant use of English in science must be understood within a larger frame. First, there is the advent of this tongue as a global language generally. British colonialism sowed the seeds early on, in North America, India, Australia, Hong Kong, and other centers of influence. Simultaneously, the Industrial Revolution gave English prominence in technological matters crucial to modernization.
4) However, it has really been since World War II, which so greatly advanced US military, economic, technological, and political sway (and thereby, cultural impact), that English has become linguistic capital for the larger world. Today, this tongue serves as lingua franca for a wide range of domains in daily experience: entertainment, advertising, travel and tourism, international business, telecommunications, the news media, computer technology. English is now the most popular, and most required, foreign language to be studied anywhere (1). Its uptake in technical circles, meanwhile, has been aided by the rise of "big science" in the US and the resulting vast increase in scientific output. English, in a sense, has ridden a great wave of cultural and intellectual affluence.
5) Second, there has been the globalization of science itself. Industrial development in Asia, portions of Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America has motivated the spread of research in many fields. Today, important conferences and symposia are held regularly on every continent, thereby providing demand for a common medium of speech. Part of this, too, has been the Internet, developed in the US and dominated early on by the English language. Although the Net has become more linguistically diverse with each passing year, the precincts of scholarly writing -- science above all -- continue to favor English to a high degree (2). Linguistic studies suggest that by the 1980s, more than 60% of the journal literature in science was being printed in English (3). Twenty years later, the figure is likely closer to 80% (for some fields, over 90%).
6) English has become the language chosen for international meetings of all types, for corporate science, multinational research programs, official Web sites, and much more. On the informal side, "invisible colleges" made possible by the Internet also rely on this tongue -- if a nuclear chemist from China wants to contact or collaborate with a colleague in Brazil or Germany (or both), they will use English to communicate. Less apparent is the importance all this has given to English language training, one of the major growth industries today and part of the regular technical curriculum in most universities, with upper-level courses in some countries now actually being taught in English.(4,5)
References (abridged):
1. D. Crystal, English as a Global Language (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, ed. 2, 2003).
2. Reliable numbers are hard to come by. Crystal (1) proposes an estimate of 80% English sites for the World Wide Web during the 1990s, dropping steadily, possibly to 40% or less by 2005, as all portions of the globe come online. However, science is a different matter. Electronic journals in science, which have increased greatly since 1998, are predominantly in English. Preprint archives, an especially influential and unique offering of Internet science, are also in this language. Institutional sites, such as those for research organizations, universities, international programs, and so on, are also usually in English, and where not--a key fact--they often provide a link to an English version of the site.
3. A. Large, The Foreign-Language Barrier (Deutsch, London, 1983).
4. R. Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 1992).
5. A. S. Canagarajah, Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 1999).
Science http://www.sciencemag.org
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ON SCIENTIFIC TERMINOLOGY
The following points are made by J.L. Heilbron (Nature 2002 415:585):
1) The history of scientific terminology opens a royal road to the history of scientific culture. The eighteenth century, which spent much of its intellectual energy classifying and summarizing its burgeoning knowledge, devised terminology that transformed botany and chemistry. The binomial designation of natural species introduced by Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) and the systematic names of chemical compounds invented by Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) and his collaborators remain in use, although they are not free from damaging idolatry. Linnaeus embedded his binomials in a system of arithmetically defined taxa that sometimes put species in the wrong families. The French chemists admitted the substance caloric, which does not exist, among their elements, and coined "oxygen" on the mistaken idea that the gas so designated gave acids their acidity. But the terminology, erected on the enlightened principles of rationality, order and universality, proved flexible enough to drop erroneous reifications (like caloric) and ignore misnomers (like oxygen).
2) After the Second World War, Americans gained by priority of discovery the right to name the elementary particles. Their terminology tended to be facetious and jocular. Thus, quarks in their various flavors and colors; gluons to paste quarks together; quantum chromodynamics, which does not study color; and GUTs and TOEs, not body parts but Grand Unified Theories and Theories of Everything. Did the jocularity indicate the easy confidence of people who felt close to finishing physics? It certainly demonstrated that the sober conservatism of European scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had given way to the flippant equality of Americans during their time of world dominance. The playful names coined by high-energy physicists have been criticized as inelegant, non-ancient, capricious and misleading. No doubt it is unlucky that quark means garbage in German, but gluon is an inspired put-on: it looks Greek, means nothing in German, puns in English and satisfies Bacon's requirement that a word express a clear and distinct idea.
3) Genetics and molecular biology have a taxing and awkward terminology. Students of fruit flies favor bouncy names in the style of particle physicists: armadillo, hedgehog, lost-in-space. Mouse geneticists like dull ones, such as beta-catenin, which happens to be the same gene as armadillo. A single gene (selectin L) has 15 different aliases, whereas MT1 refers to at least 11 different genes.The cure for this genetic disorder is a computer, which identifies a gene not by its name but by systematic descriptors.
Nature http://www.nature.com/nature
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HISTORY OF SCIENCE: ON LANGUAGE REFORM IN CHEMISTRY
An argument can be made that nomenclature in science is as important as data, since nomenclature represents the prevailing conceptual organization of observations. Certainly, researchers in most sciences are constrained to adhere to the nomenclature rules of their field. Molecular biology is currently in a phase of general nomenclature chaos with respect to the naming of genes, but hopefully that phase will soon pass. Meanwhile, nomenclatures in other areas of biology are more organized, and 18th century plant taxonomy, in fact, served as a model for the nomenclature revolution in chemistry that occurred in conjunction with the "new chemistry" proposed by Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794).
Lavoisier is often cited as the instigator of chemical nomenclature reform at the end of the 18th century, but four chemists were the prime movers of this reform: Lavoisier, Louis Guyton de Morveau (1737-1816), Claude Berthollet (1748-1822), Antoine Fourcroy (1755-1809). Of the four, Guyton de Morveau, probably deserves more credit than the others, his efforts culminating in the publication of his _Method of Chemical Nomenclature_ in 1787 [*Note #1]. All the above chemists, however, collaborated in the nomenclature revision program, which quickly became accepted after the publication of Lavoisier's influential textbook _Elementary Treatise on Chemistry_ in 1789 [*Note #2]. Perhaps the most important general nomenclature revision was the adoption of a binomial scheme for naming compounds (influenced by the scheme then current in botany), but of specific importance was the renaming of "*dephlogisticated air" ("empyreal air; vital air) as "oxygen", and the renaming of "inflammable air" as "hydrogen", both new names based on prevailing knowledge of chemistry rather than on ambiguous attributes.
The following points are made by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (Nature 2001 410:415):
1) Guyton de Morveau initiated the French 18th century chemical nomenclature reform project and established a set of basic principles: a) nomenclature should reveal "the nature of things"; b) simple substances should have simple names evoking their most characteristic property; c) compound names should express the composition of chemical compounds; d) Greek etymologies should be used in preference to Latin.
2) Guyton de Morveau began his attempt to reform chemical nomenclature in 1782 and submitted his project to the Paris Academy of Sciences in January 1787. At the Academy, Guyton encountered a fierce debate concerning the existence of "phlogiston", the principle that was believed to explain combustion and reduction. Although most chemists at that time believed in phlogiston, Lavoisier's explanation of combustion was quite different. Guyton allied himself with Lavoisier, and with the help of Lavoisier, Berthollet, and Fourcroy, Guyton published a revised project in the spring of 1787, the revision making no mention of "phlogiston", but instead containing new words such as "oxygen", from Greek words meaning "acidifying principle", the new term stemming from Lavoisier's idea that all acids contained oxygen.
3) The author points out that the language reform of 1787-1789 was an integral part of the formation of the autonomous discipline of chemistry, contributed to the subordination of pharmacy to chemistry, and contributed to the redefinition of the chemical arts as applied chemistry. The new language forged by academic chemists separated many users of chemical substances from their own traditions. The new language ignored the physiological senses of chemists, banished all reference to geographical origins or the discovery of the substances, and imposed an analytical quantitative logic on chemical nomenclature. Although the use of this logic proved to be a valuable method over time, the principles of the system were never strictly applied. Oxygen, for example, should have been renamed when Humphrey Davy (1778-1829) established that many acids do not contain oxygen.
4) Colors and odors were restored after the discovery of chlorine and iodine, named from the Greek for "yellowish-green" and "violet", respectively. Bromine was named from the Greek word for "stink". Morphine was named after Morpheus, the god of dreams. Benzene was named after Styrax benzoin, a tree native to Sumatra and Java. Scandium, germanium, and polonium were named after political entities, and in the 20th century various new elements were named after historical scientific figures. In general, the systematization imposed by the four 18th century reformer chemists in the name of rationality remained an ideal often contradicted by practice. At present, nomenclature rules in chemistry are under the control of a permanent commission, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).
Nature http://www.nature.com/nature
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Notes by ScienceWeek:
Note #1: Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737-1816) was an interesting personage. His first profession was that of an attorney. In 1776, while still an attorney, he published the _Elements of Theoretical and Practical Chemistry_, a major attempt to quantify chemical affinities. In 1782, he gave up the law and devoted himself full-time to chemistry. In 1795, he founded the Ecole Polytechnique and taught there until 1805. Guyton was one of the first to conclude that iron and steel differ solely in their carbon content. He made improvements in the manufacture of gunpowder. He was the first to use chlorine and hydrochloric acid gas as disinfectants. He was one of the first balloonists, making two flights in 1784 and helping in the organization of the world's first air force, the Compagnie d'Aerostiers, whose reconnaissance balloonists assisted the French army in several battles during the Napoleonic wars.
Note #2: Concerning nomenclature in chemistry, the following passage appears in Lavoisier's _A General Introduction to Chemistry_ (1789):
"It is impossible to dissociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based; the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind; and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and same reality. Words are thus required to preserve and transmit ideas, so that it is clear that the advancement of a science and the improvement of its technical vocabulary go hand in hand. No matter how certain we are of the phenomena, no matter how adequately our concepts reflect them, we cannot help perpetuating wrong ideas unless we have a precise terminology in which to express ourselves."
Lavoisier, considered the father of modern chemistry, was no doubt the most eminent scientist to ever suffer death by the guillotine. In 1780, as a member of the French Academy of Sciences, Lavoisier was active in rejecting the application to the Academy of a certain physician Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793). Marat apparently did not forget. During the French Revolution (1787-1799), Marat became a powerful revolutionary leader, and Marat was instrumental in bringing Lavoisier to trial for his investments in a much-hated company that collected taxes for the French government. Lavoisier was guillotined May 8, 1794 and buried in an unmarked grave. (Marat did not live to see this: Marat himself was assassinated in July 1793.)
dephlogisticated air: In this context, the term "phlogiston" refers to a 17th and 18th century chemical theory involving a hypothetical principle of fire. The idea was that every combustible substance is in part composed of phlogiston, with the phenomenon of burning caused by the liberation of phlogiston and the "dephlogistonated" substance remaining as ash or residue. The phlogiston theory was experimentally discredited by Lavoisier beginning in 1770, who showed that the newly discovered element oxygen was always involved in combustion.
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