How Science Was Done Before and After Global English.

摘要

Michael Gordin is right to be amazed that scientists are 'the most resolutely monoglot international community the world has ever seen' (p. 2), using only one language - English. But it was not always so, and this isn't still the case. The book is about the history of scientific languages, that is, about communicating (within) science. Each of 11 chapters focuses on one case study, which is a pretext for more general inquiries. The first is focused on Latin as a scientific language, with a short comparison with contemporary English and classical Arabic or Chinese. The subject of the second is Dmitri Mendeleev and the fight to accept Russian as the fourth important language of science (in addition to German, French and English), whereas the third one, with a clever title - referring to the Russian tradition of patronymic names - Hydrogen Oxygenovich focuses on the problem for the West with the Russian language and with more general issues of chemical nomenclature. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on artificial (scientific) languages: Esperanto, Volapuek or Ido; and the political tensions connected with such linguistic endeavours and the practical, grammatical and lexical problems involved in the use of such languages in academic communication. Chapters 6 and 7 present the history of German as a language of science - one of the most important academic languages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially for chemistry. The political situation connected with World War I (WWI) and World War II (WWII), particularly with the Nazi period, caused a decline in the importance of the German language as a dominant. Chapters 8 and 9 focus on institutional issues related to scientific languages and the problem of machine or automatic translation. Chapter 10, titled The Fe Curtain (again brilliant title!), combines the problems of the earlier parts into one for the post-war situation of global science, with Germany - again - as a contact zone between the East and the West, on one hand, and, on the other, a conflict sphere in the denazification process (as well as the takeover of post-Nazi scholarly discoveries, academics, infrastructure). Chapter 11 is titled Anglophonia and together with the conclusion, Babel Beyond tries to deal with the question of the phenomenon of global English.