Book Review by Allen Barkkume
Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English does everything you wanted to. Michael Gordon charts the map
of scientific language from consolidation of the triumvirate – English, French,
German – in the 1850’s, to the forecasted future. Everywhere in between is
strung together by multilingual transactions of scientists in pursuit of universal
truth and entire populations at the whim of geopolitical dynamics.
Perhaps we should begin with the lamentations of the French
linguist Louis Coturat, near the end of the 19th century, as he pits
the most sufficiently advanced technology against this ageless, human problem
of communication:
“What is the good of telegraphing from one continent to
another, or telephoning from one country to another, if the two correspondents
do not have a common language in which they can converse?”
And on the plight of the scientist? “To keep themselves
acquainted with the special scientific work and studies which interested them,
all savants would have to be polyglots; but to become polyglots they would have
to abandon every other study, and therefore they would be almost destitute of
knowledge of their special subjects.” (p107).
Science must have a means of transporting itself from one scientist
to another, and with this, Gordon defines the vehicular language, or the auxiliary
language. In opposition, people – both ordinary people and scientists alike – best
express their own thoughts in a way that is comfortable and meaningful to them,
a natural language. One is for the
mind, and the other for the heart (p113). These are the forces that push language-choice
throughout history. From Latin roots to warring 20th century fragments, the
chosen language of science has shifted dramatically over this time. In the
final chapter and conclusion, Gordin explains this trend toward Global English and
questions its implications.
Language is a very fluid thing, and to tell the history of
language requires tremendous orchestration of not only dates, events, and
people, but knowledge from other subjects as well. In this book, that subject
is Science itself. The body of scientific knowledge is immense, to say the
least, but this story centers mostly on Chemistry as the discipline of study.
During the most critical period of the monolingual formation that took place
within the 20th century, organic chemistry was full-steam-ahead the most
popular branch of science at the time. But furthermore, “Chemistry is the
science of description, taxonomy, and nomenclature as much as it is about test
tubes, pipettes, and Bunsen Burners.” (21).
Chemistry was the most dominant branch of study at the time
when the triumvirate of German-English-French was the most common language
choice. In fact, Gordin begins his story by retelling the standardization of
the Periodic Table of Elements as a nationalist competition between Germany and Russia, with a little bit of
translator’s error thrown in. (Gordin later reminds us, via H. Beam Piper’s
1957 sci-fi story Omnilingual –
That’s the Periodic Table; It’s the
only one there is.)
Russian and Japanese became very important during the second
half of the century, and so the subject moves to mathematics and nuclear
physics. But by then, machine translation enters the scene and redistributes
the priorities of all players. By the 21st century, the global language for
scientific communication is Global English.
Not only is the study of language a meta-logic activity in
that the language is just as much about speakers and subject matter as it is
about the words themselves, but the language of Science?... double meta-(!). Gordin reminds us that
"scientific utterances are a kind of ‘meta-language’ that are only
partially expressed in any individual tongue but are equally true in all of
them." (p11). And Science, as it is presented here, is seen in its
true light: A thing that ought to be very clear and forthright is instead
obfuscated by the floating lexicon of a multilingual system of communication.
In the search for a universal language of communication to
match the universal truth of science, one should immediately ask – why not
Latin? And with good reason; Latin was, until Global English, the most
universal language in the Western world. Perhaps the most mnemonically useful
bit used by Gordin to explain why not
Latin is this: “Classical Latin has no present or past participle of the verb ‘to
be’, which makes rendering medieval metaphysics rather dicey.” (p34). It seems
somewhat counterintuitive, as one scientist notes, since Latin was already dead
and no longer subject to change. Nonetheless, Latin was simply no longer usable
as an auxiliary language because it was so
far removed from living speakers' natural
tongues.
The language problem in science has always existed, but it
was not until the Chemical Revolution of the mid 1800’s that it became a huge
obstacle in the pursuit of knowledge. The introduction of the aromatic ring-structure
theory of organic chemistry brought thousands of new compounds. The subsequent
fledgling industries of pharmaceuticals and artificial dyestuffs required a
consistent nomenclature for these new chemicals. Furthermore, the language of
chemistry is a language of formulas,
and as such, translation is difficult.
For the duration of the 20th century, Science sought a
balance between a language that everyone could both agree upon and understand.
Considering the tumult of 20th century geopolitics, consensus in this area was
not easily obtained. Language is a symbol of a people, a nation, a way of life.
At a time when such things were threatened in their very existence, one can
imagine the embedded contention when deciding which language would win.
As a side note, because this isn't expounded too much in the book, Gordin does
point out that Chemical nomenclature, despite its multi-lingual origins, did
tend towards a convergence of syntax. The lexicon may have differed, but the
linguistic formula of science rose
above semantics. This is one of the points that makes this book so interesting –
science really is a language to itself.
Back to the core of the story. As the standardized International
Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) eventually makes clear, Chemical
nomenclatures are ultimately artificial. That is to say, they do not grow
organically from the mouths of entire populations over generations, but instead
flow from the minds of a concentrated few, and from painstakingly organized
conferences. And with this, it seems less surprising that whole languages had
been constructed from scratch to facilitate communication amongst all parties.
Esperanto is the most well known of these constructed languages but it's not
the only one, and its life is not as simple nor as ill-fated as one might
expect. (There still exist today native speakers of Esperanto.)
As Gordin explains, an entirely artificial language is not as outlandish as it first
seems. In fact, he reminds us that “scientific languages have to be quite
consciously constructed [because] modern science focuses upon novelty: new
objects in the world, new ideas, new theories.” (p81). The discovery of a
never-before-known chemical element needs to be named, and anew.
Again, writing a book about the “language” of an ostensible
meta-language (Science) is not without its self-reflective humor. This book is laden
with correspondence between scientists, and it shouldn't be lost on the reader
that so much of this correspondence is itself prefaced by the reasons for the
writer’s use of the chosen language of correspondence – “I wanted to write you
in Russian, however...,” or concluded with apologies for fumbling with an
unfamiliar tongue (p88).
Take also the vociferous and intricate debates over the
grammar and lexicon of artificially-created languages, all undertaken itself in
a bevy of languages. It's enough to make your head spin, so if that's what you
expected when you saw this title, you'll be satisfied.
The story marches onward, although with the advent of computerized
machine translation, one would assume the problem solved. However due to the “hype
cycle” of new technologies, the promises of mind-machine melding did not fully deliver.
That, combined with the debilitating paranoia of the Cold War, forced the dream
of computerized super-lingual omniscience to get a reality-check.
Gordin also details the effects of the sheer volume of
writing. By the mid 1900’s the scientific publishing industry resorted to
compiling “abstract journals” where “each month a hefty tome would arrive at an
office in the US, be ripped apart, distributed, translated, edited, stitched
back together, and printed, all within 6 months – and this was done for dozens
of journals, every month, for decades.” (p258). In the end, Global English
didn’t win because it was the best-suited to scientific inquiry and discourse;
it just happened to be the natural language of the largest publishing and
distribution infrastructure on the planet.
Low and behold, we find ourselves in a new century, and with
a new solution to the ageless problem. The last chapter and the conclusion,
“Anglophonia” and “Babel Beyond,” can stand by themselves. Granted, the corpus
of research planted before this gives the authority under which it is read, but
honestly, I would have paid the price of the book for these two chapters, and
since I already am, I’ll continue in a rambling fashion.
Why English? Besides the emergent behavior of the scientific
publishing industry, Gordin reminds us that “the perception of neutrality has
been the engine enabling English omnipresence in international science” (p295).
On a side note, he questions why the inconsistency in English spelling isn’t
brought up more often as a problem in scientific English – and finishes the
thought by suggesting “probably because the lexicon is so circumscribed for
each sub-discipline.” (p296). He reminds us that even as late as 1947, there
were people anticipating the continuation of the triumvirate. He throws this
one at you – “There are more words in English dedicated to the various sciences
than for any other function… There are also more scientific words in English that
have at least partly Ancient Greek roots than there are words in Ancient Greek.”
(p299). And then he sums it up:
English has attained its current position owing to a series
of historical transformations that it also in turn shaped, exploiting a
perception of neutrality that it gained through being distinctly non-neutral in
either its British or American guise. p315
Then he really lets loose. In “Babel Beyond,” he drops an
entire short sci-fi story, and then goes on to explain how SETI is an extension
of this line of thought resounding in the book – it’s a decision about language
(albeit alien language). And in case you were wondering – the language of
interstellar discourse? Mathematics, obviously.
This book is a well-documented body of research, but the way
it’s been assembled, and the underlying theme are intriguing, stimulating, and
current. Science is like humans – messy. It takes a good writer to clean it up
just enough to be presentable, but not enough that it’s no longer exciting.
Michael Gordin has done just that.
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