{UAH} Nobel Prize: How English beat German as language of science
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Nobel Prize: How English beat German as language of science
Nina PorzuckiPRI's The World
"Oxygen" or "Sauerstoff"? A scientist conducts an experiment in an undated German filmTwo Norwegian scientists have won the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine - for work published in the English language. Historian of science Michael Gordin explains why they wrote in the language of Dickens and Twain rather than Ibsen and Hamsun.
Permafrost, oxygen, hydrogen - it all looks like science to me.
But these terms actually have origins in Russian, Greek and French.
Today, though, if a scientist is going to coin a new term, it's most likely in English. And if they are going to publish a new discovery, it is most definitely in English.
Look no further than the Nobel Prize awarded for physiology and medicine to Norwegian couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser. Their research was written and published in English.
This was not always so.
"If you look around the world in 1900, and someone told you, 'Guess what the universal language of science will be in the year 2000', you would first of all laugh at them. It was obvious that no one language would be the language of science, but a mixture of French, German and English would be the right answer," says Princeton University's Rosengarten professor of modern and contemporary history Michael Gordin.
Gordin's upcoming book, Scientific Babel, explores the history of language and science. He says that English was far from the dominant scientific language in 1900. The dominant language was German.
"So the story of the 20th Century is not so much the rise of English as the serial collapse of German as the up-and-coming language of scientific communication," Gordin says.
You may think of Latin as the dominant language of science. And for many, many years it was the universal means of communication in Western Europe - from the late medieval period to the mid-17th Century. Then it began to fracture. Latin became one of many languages in which science was done.
The first person to publish extensively in his native language, according to Gordin, was Galileo. Galileo wrote in Italian and was then translated to Latin so that more scientists might read his work.
Two boys watch a scientist perform an experiment in a Bayer Group laboratory in GermanyFast forward to the 20th Century. How did English come to dominate German in the realm of science?
"The first major shock to the system of basically having a third of science published in English, a third in French and a third in German - although it fluctuated based on field, and Latin still held out in some places - was World War One, which had two major impacts," Gordin says.
After World War One, Belgian, French and British scientists organised a boycott of scientists from Germany and Austria. They were blocked from conferences and weren't able to publish in Western European journals.
"Increasingly, you have two scientific communities, one German, which functions in the defeated [Central Powers] of Germany and Austria, and another that functions in Western Europe, which is mostly English and French," Gordin explains.
It's that moment in history, he adds, when international organisations to govern science, such as the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, were established. And those newly established organisations begin to function in English and French. German, which was the dominant language of chemistry, was written out.
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