Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

No, it's not. If Owain (the PhD who wrote his thesis in Welsh) wanted to be productive and advance his field, he would want his research to have the largest audience possible. Quoting the article:

'In his thesis, ‘Astudiaeth Gyfrifiadurol o Synthesis a Sefydlogrwydd Defnyddiau Mandyllog Anorganig’, Owain used computational science to see how porous materials could be used for green energy processes and sustainable chemistry.

Owain’s PhD was funded through Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol’s Ysgoloriaeth Ymchwil scheme, which aims to support PhD students in conducting research and writing a thesis through the medium of Welsh.

As part of his study, Owain identified gaps in Welsh scientific terminology.

He worked with terminologists in Bangor to create new terms, and with help from the wider Welsh-speaking chemistry community, Owain added new scientific terms to the Welsh dictionary.

These include:

“damcaniaeth dwysedd ffwythianolion” meaning “density functional theory”'

Interesting observation, a language that hasn't evolved (due to lack of demand) to include scientific terms. Speaking zero Welsh I wonder if the choice for "density functional theory" was specifically chosen to sound "Welsh" instead of going for Anglicisation.

Take Romanian, the word for "cheese" goes all the way back to Dacians, but there was no "density functional theory" until rather recently so that was borrowed as "densitate functionala teoretica". Except for declination, basically the foreign words... which might actually be French: "la théorie fonctionnelle de la densité".

I wonder about the computer-related terms in Welsh: copied ad-litteram or adapted? Like English: "software", French-adapted: "douce-article". English: "mouse", French: "souris". Well.. funk me, the French actually say "la souris d'ordinateur"! :)

There's a line in a Bill Bryson book about watching Welsh TV, and noticing they used the english term "dirty weekend", as (allegedly?) the Welsh don't have the concept

What's a dirty weekend?

A couple staying away at a hotel. If they already have kids, the kids are definitely not going.

It’s a semi common term in the UK and would be used casually among friends and close workmates to indicate a short break with just you and your partner.

Ah that explains it, neither heard it in the US or Canada, but I'm not too well versed in British English.

Always important to note that Bill Bryson has no actual training in linguistics, he’s a journalist that has just turned his hand to whatever subject would pay. His book about language The Mother Tongue has a factual error or misunderstanding on nearly every single page.

> density functional theory

The origin of all three words is Latin: density from densitas, functional from functiō, theory from theōria.

Both Romanian and French are Romance languages, i.e. their origin is Latin, and English (a Germanic language) also has strong Latin and French influences, mostly borrowed words like these.

There's a bunch of similar cases, from memory. Hebrew was rekindled in 1940-1950s as a national language for Israel after centuries of mostly being a religious language - needed new words.

Czech, similarly, regained popularity in the nationalist movement of 19th century and invented a bunch of words for concepts introduced in the meantime. To a native Polish speaker, it still sounds very anachronistic.

Navajo code speakers of WWII needed terms for "battleship" and "dive bomber" etc and came up with delightful concepts like "fire canoe" etc.

> “damcaniaeth dwysedd ffwythianolion”

Each of those three words was already a Welsh word - clearly Welsh already has words meaning “density”, “function”, and “theory” - so it seems the innovation is combining them in a new sense rather than making up new words as such.

Indeed, and in a typically Welsh order, which puts the noun "damcaniaeth" (= "theory") first, followed by the adjectives.

I think the innovation is in finding the appropriate Welsh words to represent the concepts involved. I'd imagine that would be easy in many cases, but there may be other scenarios where several words could be used to mean the same concept, and the work is in choosing the most appropriate.

I mean, it happens in software jargon too: most of us have had to name objects <XYZ>Manager/Handler/Executor/Service/etc.

(it's "[density functional] theory" so it would be théorie de la fonctionnelle de la densité, "theory of the density functional", not "functional theory of density")

> "douce-article"

Never seen that, I'm only aware of "logiciel" for software.

In order for a language to be used for science, it has to be made that way. For instance, 150 years ago Afrikaans was considered nothing more than corrupted Dutch. But the Afrikaner nationalists - for all their faults - did put a lot of effort into bringing the language to a similar standard as English: establishing universities, ensuring there was scientific and industrial vocabulary, and so on. They often took the route of coining new words, rather than borrowing from English or Dutch. For instance, a computer in Afrikaans is a rekenaar - which originally meant someone who does calculations (similar to the original meaning of 'computer')

>For instance, a computer in Afrikaans is a rekenaar

In German it's Rechner, meaning the same.

Which in English is reckoner, with related meaning.

Nowadays the momentum for the evolution of Afrikaans has passed from South Africa’s white Afrikaners (who have been shifting to English outside the farming community) to the Coloureds (for whom it serves as an important cornerstone of ethnic identity). Already there has been a lot of complaint that standardized descriptions of Afrikaans fail to account for how the Coloureds use the language, and moreover I’m not sure the Coloureds care so much about Afrikaans as a language of technical description and science, they may be content with an English–Afrikaans diglossia in that regard.

What is very interesting is that prior to the separation of the races around 1950, whites and coloureds spoke the same Afrikaans. I read a paper from 1948 which only looked at the white Afrikaans context, but which mentioned that most white Afrikaners were educated in English and spoke Afrikaans with forms which today would be considered typically coloured - i.e pronouncing the word for hands as 'hanne' instead the way it was spelled 'hande'.

Rekenaar is a German word (Rechner) and simply means computer.

You’re right but also very few theses are actually read. I know people who have delisted theirs from Google scholar because they had better presentations of the same results published in journals after they defended.

True, but at least we invented the equals sign!

Surely he must have published articles in English.

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