TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Talking Science
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0000
[Scientific languages, Chemical Revolution, Ammon, French, Whorfianism]
The introduction describes the category of “scientific languages” — the languages in which science is done — and justifies the need to pay attention to their history. Building on the work of sociolinguist Ulrich Ammon, the introduction explores important sociolinguistic issues such as citation bias, the linguistic relativist hypothesis (Whorfianism), as well as the inadequacy of metaphorical articulations of “language” in the historiography of science. Finally, an account of the Chemical Revolution of the late eighteenth century is offered which pays particular attention to the relationship between French and English in the debates over the status of oxygen. (pages 1 - 22)
Chapter 1: The Perfect Past That Almost Was
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0001
[Latin, Bergman, Torbern Bergman, Cicero, Vernacularization]
This chapter traces the history of Latin as a scientific language of natural philosophy from the time of Cicero (1st century B.C) to the end of the eighteenth century. Latin, like every other language, was not ab initio naturally able to “contain” scientific concepts; rather, Cicero and other bilingual Roman elites had to work to adapt Greek concepts about the physical world to the Latin language. The history of Greek learning is traced through Arabic in the Eastern Mediterranean, before the twelfth-century translation movements made Arabic revisions of Greek thought accessible to Latin readers. The chapter also compares the role of Latin in Western Europe with Sanskrit in South Asia and Classical Chinese in East Asia. The concluding section of the chapter follows the process of vernacularization of science out of Latin through the case of Torbern Bergman, the important Swedish chemist of the late eighteenth-century. (pages 23 - 50)
Chapter 2: The Table and the Word
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0002
[Mendeleev, Dmitrii, Meyer, Julius Lothar, Russian, Periodic table, Priority]
This chapter explores the importance of translation and mistranslation between languages of science through the case of the priority dispute between Dmitrii Mendeleev and Julius Lothar Meyer over the discovery of the periodic table during the 1870s. Mendeleev’s version of the periodic system was translated from Russian into German with a mistake rendering the word “periodic” as “phased,” and Meyer (ignorant of the Russian original) attempted to introduce the notion of periodicity into German. The dispute over priority eventually resolved in credit-sharing, and Russian was elevated as a junior member of the confederacy of scientific languages as a consequence. (pages 51 - 78)
Chapter 3: Hydrogen Oxygenovich
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0003
[Russian Chemical Society, Russian, German, Chemical nomenclature, Butlerov, Aleksandr]
This chapter traces the history of Russian since the end of the first millennium and concentrates on the development of a chemical nomenclature, adapting French and German precedents to the Russian language. Special attention is paid to the difficulties experienced by Russians in using German in both oral and written exchanges with European scientists, and the translation of chemical textbooks, especially that by Aleksandr Butlerov, from Russian into German, reversing the usual flow of scientific information. (pages 79 - 104)
Chapter 4: Speaking Utopian
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0004
[Esperanto, Zamenhof, Volapük, Internacia Scienca Revuo, Artificial languages, Auxiliary languages]
This chapter frames the question of scientific languages through debates over “auxiliary languages” — languages used to accomplish a communicative function — and especially the proposals to construct an artificial language to serve as such an auxiliary. After discussing the history of Volapük, the artificial language that dominated the 1880s, the emphasis of the chapter is on the history of L. L. Zamenhof’s Esperanto, the leading artificial language down to the present day. Particular attention is paid to the debates over the construction of a chemical nomenclature in the first Esperanto scientific periodic, the Internacia Scienca Revuo. (pages 105 - 130)
Chapter 5: The Wizards of Ido
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0005
[Ido, Artificial languages, Ostwald, Wilhelm, Couturat, Louis, Esperanto]
This chapter continues the history of Esperanto and science by tracing the debates following the decision of the 1907 Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language to select an artificial language to serve as the universal auxiliary for scholars. At first expected to select Esperanto, the Delegation — chaired by logician Louis Couturat — opted for a reformed Esperanto known as Ido. The bulk of the chapter describes the arguments in favor of Ido, especially the grammatical claims and those based upon Ido’s supposed greater suitability for science, an argument associated primarily with the chemical nomenclature derived by the world-famous chemist and Idist, Wilhelm Ostwald. (pages 131 - 158)
Chapter 6: The Linguistic Shadow of the Great War
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0006
[Boycott, IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry), World War I, Scientific internationalism, German]
This chapter describes the history of German as a scientific language as a component in the long development of the language since the medieval period, and as a prominent aspect of scientific internationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. The emphasis falls in two sections which chronicle the beginning of the decline of German, which had been on its way to becoming the dominant scientific language. First, after World War I, a boycott of German and Austrian scholars was instituted by Belgian, French, and British scientists, which diminished the importance of German as a medium of exchange in publishing and at scientific congresses, an obstacle that persisted after the end of the boycott in 1926 through the enshrining of French and English (but not German) as official languages of the newly-created IUPAC. The second strand follows the wartime criminalization of German in the United States from 1917 to 1924, which severely curtailed the ability of the fast-growing community of American scientists to engage with the language, thereby reinforcing the primacy of English. (pages 159 - 186)
Chapter 7: Unspeakable
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0007
[National Socialism, Civil Service Law, Émigrés, Aryan Physics, Mother tongue]
This chapter discusses the history of German as a scientific language under National Socialism (1933-1945), stressing the need of scientific émigrés — principally those dismissed under the anti-Semitic Civil Service Law of 1933 — to learn to function scientifically in other languages (primarily English) in their new homes, and on the politicization of German as a distinctive “mother tongue” by the Nazis. In addition, well-known aspects of the history of science in the Third Reich, such as the Aryan Physics movement and the restriction of scientific travel and visas, are placed in a linguistic context. (pages 187 - 212)
Chapter 8: The Dostoevsky Machine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0008
[Machine Translation, Georgetown-IBM Experiment, Soviet language policy, Dostert, Léon, Scientific Russian]
This chapter chronicles the perceived “translation crisis” in the United States during the early Cold War, and the pressures of Soviet language policy to promote Russian as the sole language of scientific communication within the Soviet Union. Upon the failure of American scientists to access that information, an educational initiative was launched to teach “Scientific Russian,” a reduced subset of Russian considered sufficient to read scientific publications. Subsequently, Georgetown University professor Léon Dostert pioneered the first operational Machine Translation initiative — the Georgetown-IBM Experiment — in 1954 to translate scientific Russian into English using a digital computer. (pages 213 - 240)
Chapter 9: All the Russian That’s Fit to Print
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0009
[Dostert, Léon, Cover-to-cover translation journals, Coleman, Earl Maxwell, Machine Translation, VINITI]
This chapter continues the story of Machine Translation from the expansion of American and Soviet research in this field beginning in the mid-1950s until the collapse of the first wave of experiments in 1966, mostly by following the Georgetown University initiatives pioneered by Léon Dostert. A second narrative line looks at the organization of scientific information in libraries, with particular emphasis on VINITI, the unified Soviet bureaucracy tasked with the job. Finally, the emergence of cover-to-cover translation journals, at first through publishing entrepreneur Earl Maxwell Coleman, and later through federal subsidy, displaced much of the pressure of the scientific “translation crisis” and helped diminish the enthusiasm for Machine Translation while simultaneously catapulting English to the position of leading scientific language. (pages 241 - 266)
Chapter 10: The Fe Curtain
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0010
[Occupation, Humboldt University, Max Planck Society, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Beilstein, Chemisches Zentralblatt]
This chapter describes German attempts to shore up the decline of German as a language of science with a focus on the city of Berlin, beginning from the Occupation in 1945 to the end of the 1970s. After exploring attempts in the Communist East to adjust to the influx of the Russian language as an important scientific tool at the Humboldt University and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the chapter also examines the way institutions in West Germany, such as the Free University in Berlin and the Max Planck Society, adjusted to scientific English. Two particular state-subsidized attempts to stabilize German’s decline in chemistry — the Beilstein Handbuch of organic compounds and the abstract journal Chemisches Zentralblatt — are closely examined. (pages 267 - 292)
Chapter 11: Anglophonia
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0011
[English, Global English, Basic English, Nobel Prizes, Linguistic justice]
This chapter explores the transition of English from being one of several languages of science to the overwhelmingly dominant language of science by the end of the Cold War. The history of attempts to make English more easily accessible, such as “Basic English” are discussed, along with the rise of Global English in the sciences, as tracked by the Anglification of the Nobel Prizes. Questions of linguistic justice are addressed in the chapter’s conclusion. (pages 293 - 316)
Conclusion: Babel Beyond
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226000329.003.0012
[SETI, Global English, Science fiction]
The conclusion ties together the themes of the book by looking at attitudes to the reversibility of Global English’s dominance in the sciences, and then exploring two ways in which intellectuals have attempted to imagine science beyond English: first, through science fiction, and then through the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). (pages 317 - 326)
Acknowledgments
List of Archives
Notes
Index
