Science as we know it is a rigorously systematic method of knowing general truths or the operation of general laws, and English is the dominant language today for learning, pursuing, testing, and communicating it. But until the first years of the 20th century there was actually a Babel of tongues jockeying for primacy in the scientific discipline—from Latin in the Middle Ages to German, Russian, and French in the 1850s onwards to attempts in the 19th century at constructed languages like Volapük, Esperanto, and Solresol that all proved to be unavailing. Ultimately, it was an upstart language in the science arena—English—that rose as the unchallenged lingua franca above the web of politics, money, and international conflict that tangled that search.
Science historian Michael Gordin vividly and authoritatively chronicles how English became the latter-day monogloth language of science in his book
Scientific Babel: The Language of Science from the Fall of Latin to the Rise of English (Profile Books, 432 pages). Gordin doesn’t attempt a grand unified history of scientific languages; the book actually bypasses the slow decline of Latin and the glory years of the German-Russian-French language triumvirate and dwells instead with great enthusiasm on the polyglot history of the global scientific community from the mid-1900s up to contemporary times.
Says John Gallagher in his review of Gordin’s book the April 2, 2015 issue of
The Guardian UK: “This reconstruction of nearly two centuries of scientific Babel reminds us that histories of science and discovery are always more than simple tales of great men and women: they are choral, and discordant, and it is only by listening for their many voices that we can begin to get at the reality of the past.”
Read Chapter 1: “The Perfect Past That Almost Was” from Michael Gordin’s Scientific Babel in the BarnesandNoble.com now!Read John Gallagher’s review of Michael Gordin’s Scientific Babel in The Guardian UK now!Read Richard Joyner’s review of Michael Gordin’s Scientific Babel in the Times Higher Education UK now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Michael Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, where he specializes in the history of modern science. In 2013-2014 he served as the inaugural director of the Fung Global Fellows Program. He came to Princeton in 2003 after earning his A.B. (1996) and his Ph.D. (2001) from Harvard University, and serving a term at the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2011 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was named a Guggenheim Fellow. He has published on the history of science, Russian history, and the history of nuclear weapons.
ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:In “The trite stuff. (Clichés refreshed),” American two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gene Weingarten argues that the rampant use of clichés is a reliable mark of the hack writer, a person who he says either hasn’t heard of or has chosen to ignore the classic wry writerly advice: “Avoid clichés like the plague.” He then proceeds to share with readers an assortment of clichés along with their original modernized expressions as contributed by “an online group of smartasses” (devotees of
The Washington Post’s “Style Invitational” wordplay contest), among them “Dead as a doornail” (“Assigned to a congressional subcommittee”) and “Took the easy way out” (“Crowdsourced a column).”
Read Gene Weingarten “The trite stuff. (Clichés refreshed)” from The Washington Post Writers Group now!
