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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

English is very interesting in that if a word makes sense to use (rather than a phrase) then English will borrow that word without hesitation.

Actually because the language of science and technology is English there are lots of concepts that can’t be expressed in any other language. Sure any emotion a human can feel can be expressed in any language, but most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed in any language other than English. Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers.

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    most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed
    in any language other than English. Out of the total
    number of human concepts that have ever been communicated,
    the majority are only available to English speakers.

Please provide examples to support your baseless claim.

Pick any scientific paper at random. No other language other than English has the terms and concepts required to write the paper - you can’t translate most scientific papers into another language since the complete set of terms and concepts don’t exist in any other languages.

It is not that you can’t write scientific papers in other languages (many are written in other languages), just that we have settled on English as the language of science. The vast majority of new scientific papers are written in English and hence every new concept within them can’t be expressed in any other language since there are no corresponding vocabulary to map the new concept onto. You can of course make up a new term in an another language if you want, but in this is not done for the many new concepts since it is more productive to just work within English.

Of course there are some papers that are written in a foreign language and which contain new concepts. These papers can’t be translated into English without inventing new terms in English. The whole untranslatability issue is purely a numbers game where the papers in English only vastly outnumber those in any other language and hence most of the novel concepts are in English alone.

Well, paraphrasing your post...

Pick any scientific paper related with biodiversity at random. No other language other than latin (or maybe greek) has the terms and concepts required to write it - you can’t translate Oegopsida or Metasequoia glyptostroboides (Taxodiaceae: Conipherophytina) into english, or another language since the complete set of terms and concepts don’t exist in any other languages.

It is not that you can’t write scientific papers in other languages (lots of basic concepts in chemistry or physics developped between 17th and 19th centuries were written and expressed in french and deutsch without any effort), in fact you must use other languages. Consider writing the main parts of your work using math language. There is not much scientific articles or technical ideas developped exclusively in pure english.

You can't write a modern scientific paper in classical Greek or Latin these days as the vocabulary just doesn't exist in these languages. Sure scientific papers borrow terms from other languages, but today you can really only write most papers in English - the required terminology and concepts are missing from most languages. There really is a world of ideas only accessible in English.

As you rightly point out there is nothing about English that makes it suited for science inherently - it is just an accident of history. This does not change the fact that today the language of science is English and hence many scientific ideas are expressed exclusively in English.

    You can't write a modern scientific paper in classical
    Greek or Latin

You're comparing modern day English with languages that have died more than 1500 years ago. Your arguments are incoherent and suggest a serious lack of judgment.

I think it would be more productive to read what I have actually written rather than personally attack me.

I have read what you wrote - that is what upset me. You come up with ridiculous, blatantly false, unfounded claims and don't back them up. I understand it might be annoying to be called out like this, but letting this ignorance pass without calling it out is akin to agreeing with it. I still think you're wrong. But I'm not on a witch hunt, if this is what concerns you.

I can't imagine why you would get upset about something so abstract. Let's have a civilised discussion about if highly technical concepts can be translated into languages other than English, not make personal attacks.

I am upset in the intellectual sense, not the physical.

There is no discussion to be had. You are wrong. If you cannot accept the basic fact that any concept can be translated into any language (efficiency notwithstanding) then fine, just don't pretend you want to engage in "civilised discussion".

Confrontation is not a personal attack. The arguments you gave (and still support) are evidence of someone who is either trolling or has not seen the world. Honest question: do you speak/read multiple languages?

Yes I can read (and speak badly) a few languages (Spanish, French and a bit of Italian) and I have travelled widely - not that it is really relevant.

I think you can’t accept that there are many concepts that can’t be expressed in any language other than English. I am a scientist by background, trained in multiple fields for over 20 years, and yet I only have an understanding of a tiny fraction of all the scientific concepts out there (I can’t say how low, but well under 0.01%).

The vast majority of concepts (distinct ideas) that I personally know are scientific. With almost all the scientific concepts I know it is not possible to communicate to someone about the concept in any language other than English because the background concepts are missing from other languages. This is not because English is inherently superior to any other language, just a consequence of English being the common language of science.

You see this when you go to a scientific conference - people who speak a common language other than English will chit-chat to each other in their own language, but when you hear them talking to each other about science it either totally in English, or a hybrid where ever second word is English - there is often so much English in these conversations that I can follow along even when I have no understanding of the base language.

    I think you can’t accept that there are many concepts that
    can’t be expressed in any language other than English.

I cannot accept such an absurdity, because it is false. I am also a scientist trained in theoretical physics and I have received my education in French, a colleague had his in Portuguese, another in Mandarin, yet another in French/Arabic and our professors and PIs had theirs in German, English, French, Spanish and Romanian (that I know of, could be more).

You are right that at conferences people speak English, and we speak English in group meetings for the simple reason that it's the common denominator. There is no other reason. We have scientific discussions in French and English, some have them in German or Arabic, it doesn't matter because they're all equally capable of describing scientific thought.

I think the point you're trying to make is that the scientific vocabulary in some languages, in some scientific fields, sometimes doesn't keep up with that of English. This I would concede to you. But usually, just like English does, the other languages simply borrow the new words (or craft the usually obvious equivalents using greek/latin or whatever). This has nothing to do with a language's inherent capacity of describing concepts, as you maintain. This argument is a much weaker form than that which you propose.

I think you are finally understanding what I am saying. Of course it is possible to translate all scientific concepts into any human language, just that in practice it is not done since the return is minimal and the cost high. Rather than waste an enormous amount of resources on translating every paper, conference proceeding, report and patent into the thousands of different human languages we have settled on just using English.

Any concept (and all the required prerequisite concepts) that have not been translated to the new language can’t be communicated in that language. Nothing more.

The only interesting aspect of all this is that it makes a large chunk of human thought only able to be communicated effectively in one language. It would probably would have been ideal to have settled on a synthetic language designed specifically for science communication (mathematics is part of the way there), but history didn’t turn out that way.

Gah.... instead of shaking my head in disbelief/disagreement/disappointment/stupefaction once again, I will simply wish you the best of luck in your endeavours and bail out from this impass.

At one point, German was the language of science, however.

Yes it was in some fields and still is to a certain extent in organic chemistry. The only language today other than English where a reasonable amount of new scientific knowledge is published is Chinese, but even in China there is a strong desire to publish in English if you are a scientist.

You are aware of the fact, that Einstein's papers are in German, right?

> The vast majority of new scientific papers are written in English and hence every new concept within them can’t be expressed in any other language since there are no corresponding vocabulary to map the new concept onto.

Non sequitur. But how about _you_ provide an example of a non-translatable concept in an English paper. Should not be hard: 'Just pick any scientific paper at random.'

What you're saying makes absolutely no sense. Do you even speak another language than English? Millions of people each year have their graduate education on languages other than English and are doing fine. They do learn English for broad communication, but what you're implying is that they couldn't even think in their own language since it's inadequate.

I'm sorry to say but you're full of it if you believe what you wrote. It's an absurdity only someone who has never travelled or been exposed to the world could say.

I am implying or saying none of this. I think you need to read carefully what I have written, not what you have projected on to me.

> Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers.

Wait, I'm not sure if I agree with the rest of your post, but this last sentence is surely an exaggeration, no? You mean over 50% of human concepts that were ever communicated are only available to english speakers?

Yes because so much of novel human knowledge is tied to science and technology. Sure there are millions of novels, movies, poems, etc in thousands of different languages, but the range of ideas contained within them is rather limited.

You know that English only became a lingua franca in the 20th century? Before that, hardly anything of scientific significance was expressed or published in English? The seminal works in physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology were written in German, Latin, etc

Yes of course. But since 1945 the vast majority of papers have been written in English. I think people forget how much science has grown over the last 75 years to the point where everything written pre-1945 is a small minority of the scientific literature.

Do you think that the ideas of Leibniz and Cauchy, that is differential and integral calculus, of Heisenberg and Einstein, that is Quantum mechanics and Relativity, of Curie, Mendelejew, Hahn, Bosch, ... basically, of any non-english speaking scientist with breakthrough insights, are not understood by English speaking scientists, when translated?

What makes you believe people think about concepts "In English", when they are published in English? Certainly Feynman was thinking about QM in English, even though most of the concepts were developed in Norwegian and German.

Also, I'm still waiting for a single example of an english named scientific concept, that is not understandable to a German/French expert in the field. Maybe you have at least _one_ example handy, claiming that "most scientific concepts" are of this type.

None of the scientists you listed are alive let alone at the cutting edge of science and their work proceeds the move of science to English. Interestingly all their papers when they were published were not able to be translated in English without creating new terms which made it hard for English physicists who did not speak German.

Of course German or French scientists can understand modern scientific papers because they all speak English. I have met thousands of scientists who's first language is not English and not a single one can't read English.

As for an example I literally picked the first papers I found on NCBI. Written by a Chinese team in English - good luck translating this paper into any other language [1].

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27372578

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