Hacker News Reader

Comment by sanoli | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com