Is there any benefit to having competitive languages?
It seems it would only make communicating ideas harder.
Culture? At what expense?
It seems it would only make communicating ideas harder.
Culture? At what expense?
> English speakers have become the gatekeepers of science. By keeping those gates closed, we’re missing out on a lot of perspectives and a lot of good research.
OK, so let's say we switch to having everyone publish in their own native language because gosh we wouldn't want to be gatekeepers. Now instead of one 'gate', we have... hundreds, because everyone has to learn every language or else they are being 'gatekept'. Oops.
This pervasive error, this nirvana fallacy, of praising only the benefits of multi-lingualism, renders the entire discussion moot. It's a tissue of complaints and buzzwords.
The idea that every piece of discourse should be in English is a modern phenomenon. It ironically has arrived just as the automated translation renders the interlinguistic literature gap irrelevant.
People should be talking about forcing English speakers to work in their non native language, not just about the woes of a single common language for science.
It is precisely at this moment that we have the ability to gain from cultural diversity without losing intelligibility. Will we go for this possibly? Probably not....
There are thousands of languages in use worldwide. If English weren't the modern lingua franca, what would stop people from having these same complaints about any other "universal" language?
> It ironically has arrived just as the automated translation renders the interlinguistic literature gap irrelevant.
>It is precisely at this moment that we have the ability to gain from cultural diversity without losing intelligibility
Modern translators have come a long way, but they're far from able to translate scientific texts into intelligible English, especially without losing meaning, particularly from languages which have vastly different grammatical and conceptual styles, like Chinese, for example.
I think it's just en Vogue right now to complain about the Anglo-Saxon hegemony; these problems are not caused by English per se, and the rate of progress is substantially better with this current standard than the alternative you propose of keeping international research effectively siloed by language.