Latin, the Enlightenment, and science
Andrew Usher
ceased in the 18th and 19th centuries. I have long wondered why people
accepted the use of national languages exclusively in this endeavor
where international understanding is more imperative than any other.
It is true, that the use of Latin by 1700 had already passed almost
everywhere else, but its last remaining use should still have been
enough to support it, given that Latin was the one language that every
educated man in the Western world knew, and that Latin, having such a
long tradition of use, was at least suitable for scientific and
technical purposes as any other language at the time.
And so, some explanations suggest themselves. The first is that the
predominant advocates and defenders of Latin, from the Renaissance to
now, are from the humanities; and so once Latin had disappeared from
live literary use, their support was no longer important. The second
is to blame it on the French: they abandoned Latin earlier than anyone
else, and are well-known to have an inflated view of the greatness of
their own language. But that does not seem to explain how it happened
everywhere else: had they wanted to emulate the French, they would
have started writing in French, and if they had wanted to oppose them,
they should have re-emphasised the role of Latin.
Now, of course, I can't propose the revival of Latin for these
purposes: English has virtually replaced it as the international
scientific language. But it look a long time during which dealing with
many different languages was a considerable problem, and it seems as
though this should have been avoided.
Andrew Usher
Andrew Usher
chazwin
Latin provided an invaluable tool for the transmission of ideas
throughout Europe, not bound my the restrictions of parochial
languages long before the Enlightenment. This together with the
invention of printing was the way that the Reformation exploded right
across Europe without the need for learning all the various languages
that were still unformed.
Latin's use was maintained long into the 18thC. It use continued in
Botany and other sciences in the coining of neologisms , and is still
in use to this day.
The 19thC saw the domination of English mainly because nearly all the
decent innovations, discoveries and inventions all came from Britain.
The French and the Germans had to take a back seat. The Germans seemed
to have concentrated on philosophy whilst the French spent the whole
century licking their wounds after the Napoleonic defeats.
JimboCat
> The use of Latin in the sciences and other learned fields basically
> ceased in the 18th and 19th centuries. I have long wondered why people
> accepted the use of national languages exclusively in this endeavor
> where international understanding is more imperative than any other.
> It is true, that the use of Latin by 1700 had already passed almost
> everywhere else, but its last remaining use should still have been
> enough to support it, given that Latin was the one language that every
> educated man in the Western world knew, and that Latin, having such a
> long tradition of use, was at least suitable for scientific and
> technical purposes as any other language at the time.
>
> And so, some explanations suggest themselves.
I think a major reason was the great expansion in scientific
terminology. Many new words were being coined to express new concepts.
Classical Latin just didn't have the vocabulary.
Jim Deutch (JimboCat)
--
"What is the Latin word for 'quark', anyway?"
António Marques
> I think a major reason was the great expansion in scientific
> terminology. Many new words were being coined to express new concepts.
> Classical Latin just didn't have the vocabulary.
Erm.... neither did any other language, hence '[m]any new words were being
coined'.
Mahipal7638
Science, enlightened or not, is Language independent, Language
indifferent, Latin or otherwise.
One can arbitrarily translate scientific thought, it's not poetry,
from one Language to another.
Enjo(y)...
--
Mahipal
http://mahipal7638.wordpress.com/meforce/
Marvin the Martian
> The 19thC saw the domination of English mainly because nearly all the
> decent innovations, discoveries and inventions all came from Britain.
> The French and the Germans had to take a back seat. The Germans seemed
> to have concentrated on philosophy whilst the French spent the whole
> century licking their wounds after the Napoleonic defeats.
So, Georg Ohm, Heinrich Hertz, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Clausius,
and Heinrich Lenz took a "back seat"? (All big name 19th century German
physicist)
As did Augustin Fresnel, Pierre Dulong, Alexis Petit, Pierre Curie, and
Andre Ampere? (Big name 19th century French Physicist)
How... droll. English Chauvinism is not dead.
Yes, there is a reason why back in the 1960s you had to be able to read a
foreign language, usually German or French, to get a degree in physics at
an accredited college in the English speaking United States.
And after WW II, the only reason why we had a scientific jump on the
Russians is because our captured German scientist were better than the
Russian captured German scientists. :-D
Hecman Gun
The problem of communication between different languages is also addressed. While such poses a problem, the evolution of the Internet and the people involved in translating math. papers acts as a greater factor than one international, scholar language.
English, like Latin, will wax and wane in some time as Latin did. Therefore, we also see popular culture as a demanding force here as well.
alie...@gmail.com
> The use of Latin in the sciences and other learned fields basically
> ceased in the 18th and 19th centuries. I have long wondered why people
> accepted the use of national languages exclusively in this endeavor
> where international understanding is more imperative than any other.
Oh, come on, you're claiming there's no nationalism in the sciences?
The British Imperial system of units dominated for a long time for
practical reasons; those who bought materials for scientific purposes
specified quantities in pints, gallons, and cubic feet, hence
suppliers stored and packaged them so. That spread to military and
industrial usage as well, which is why a U. S. standard pallet at 40 x
48 inches, out of all the other "standard" pallets used worldwide,
wastes the least space in a worldwide standard ISO shipping container
in these days of otherwise universal metrification.
> It is true, that the use of Latin by 1700 had already passed almost
> everywhere else, but its last remaining use should still have been
> enough to support it, given that Latin was the one language that every
> educated man in the Western world knew, and that Latin, having such a
> long tradition of use, was at least suitable for scientific and
> technical purposes as any other language at the time.
That's because the texts the students were learning from were
written by people educated in Catholic Church-run schools; you learn
the language to read the text, meaning you keep your notes in that as
well.
However, you write down military applications in your native
language.
> And so, some explanations suggest themselves. The first is that the
> predominant advocates and defenders of Latin, from the Renaissance to
> now, are from the humanities; and so once Latin had disappeared from
> live literary use, their support was no longer important. The second
> is to blame it on the French: they abandoned Latin earlier than anyone
> else, and are well-known to have an inflated view of the greatness of
> their own language. But that does not seem to explain how it happened
> everywhere else: had they wanted to emulate the French, they would
> have started writing in French, and if they had wanted to oppose them,
> they should have re-emphasised the role of Latin.
Nonsense; when the English and German courts started emulating the
manners and dress of the French court, they did not start speaking
French. Why would they?
> Now, of course, I can't propose the revival of Latin for these
> purposes: English has virtually replaced it as the international
> scientific language. But it look a long time during which dealing with
> many different languages was a considerable problem, and it seems as
> though this should have been avoided.
Speaking of metrification, how soon do you think all goods will be
shipped in multiples of li and fenin "new standard" containers,
measured in easily remembered whole numbers of li?
Yesterday morning I turned on the TV and accidentally selected
Nickelodeon, which was running a kids' program called "Ni Hao, Kai
Lan" which teaches a different Chinese word each episode.
How do you say "get offa my lawn" in Chinese?
Oh, wait, when China sells all those Fed bonds, it won't be my
lawn...
Mark L. Fergerson
Uncle Al
>
> The use of Latin in the sciences and other learned fields basically
> ceased in the 18th and 19th centuries. I have long wondered why people
> accepted the use of national languages exclusively in this endeavor
> where international understanding is more imperative than any other.
Any *single* language (e.g., air traffic control) is potentially
suitable. Said language should be displayable without crap hanging
above or below the line. Said language should encode in no more than
a ten-segment display. Said language should have a sufficently large
dictionary to accurately and precisely describe without ambiguity. NO
GENDER for nouns, no incorporated social commentary (German "du,"
Spanish "tu," all of Japanese). Language should not be constructed as
a privilege.
Latin was the language of Rome. Rome was widespread. Subjugated
poeples seek to become their conquerors. Mexico speaks Spanish,
Brazil speaks Portugues; Blacks take on the Arabic names and religion
of their original vendors.
What remains other than English?
Latin was used as scholarly language because it excluded the
uninitiated and gave the Church a leg up on censuring unacceptable
thoughts. French was used for diplomacy because nothing could be said
without ambiguity. Languages like Hawaiian or Inuit are poor jokes.
While nearly the whole world was wallowing in royal edicts, the
English Court spoke French. The vulgar people of England stripped
their language of all the elegant goo and dribble infesting written
and spoken language. Even an idiot can misspeak and write English, as
amply evidenced.
The economic, political, technological, and scientific collapse of
America has opened the window to Mandarin Chinese hegemony, and more's
the pity. One could only do worse with purposely badly grammared
Klingon.
--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz4.htm
John Stafford
a couple hundred years so that more people could participate in the
vernacular. Scholarship was no longer the realm of the Latin affluent.
Don Phillipson
news:14e01ff9-4a65-4f1b...@r33g2000prh.googlegroups.com...
> The use of Latin in the sciences and other learned fields basically
> ceased in the 18th and 19th centuries. I have long wondered why people
> accepted the use of national languages exclusively in this endeavor
> where international understanding is more imperative than any other.
Languages were not really considered "national" before the
20th century. E.g. Galileo was the first scientist of lasting
historical importance to publish in the vernacular, but this was
not because Italian or Tuscan was a "national language:" it
was just more convenient for Galileo's current needs.
Cf. (a century later) Newton published in both English in
1671 (Fluxions) and 1704 (Optics) and in Latin in 1687
(Princip. Math.) Another century later Alexander von Humboldt
chose to publish in French and Latin as well as his native
German; another century Einstein published only in German.
> It is true, that the use of Latin by 1700 had already passed almost
> everywhere else, but its last remaining use should still have been
> enough to support it, given that Latin was the one language that every
> educated man in the Western world knew, and that Latin, having such a
> long tradition of use, was at least suitable for scientific and
> technical purposes as any other language at the time.
The suitability of Latin to publish genuinely new information is
open to challenge. I would suggest Linnaeus's plant catalogue
(1753-1779) was the last great attempt to use Latin as the
international language of science. He nevertheless had
to coin a lot of new words -- and the Linnean System of
nomenclature worked in any language, thus did not require
Latin for its adoption or use.
20th century scholar Derek de Solla Price was the first to
notice the growth pattern of modern science (since Galileo
or Newton) -- a tenfold growth in the volume of new knowledge
published in each half century. This means the volume of
information grew a millionfold in 300 years. During this period
investigators have used four successive "languages of science,"
Latin, French, German and English. I believe the character
of languages had less to do with this change than the
contingencies of politics, viz. unique features of the German
academic system of the 19th century and the American
research machine of the 20th.
Non-scientists tried to go their own way by maintaining
Latin as the core of higher education (e.g. prerequisite
for admission to Oxbridge up to about 1960) and from
about 1800 adding Greek (which among late Victorians
displaced Latin as the preferred language for show-off
quotations) and adding to the "research" curriculum a
whole lot of Middle Eastern languages reconstructed
from writing (also handy for Biblical scholarship, a hot
topic i the 19th century) not to mention Persian, Sanskrit,
and Chinese and Japanese studies besides. This
offered a curriculum that appeared competitive with
hot science in the Victorian period -- but which failed to
transform the whole world the way science successfully
did: and never supported any scholarly lingua franca.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
Javi
> On Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:05:35 -0800, chazwin wrote:
>
>
>> The 19thC saw the domination of English mainly because nearly all the
>> decent innovations, discoveries and inventions all came from Britain.
>> The French and the Germans had to take a back seat. The Germans seemed
>> to have concentrated on philosophy whilst the French spent the whole
>> century licking their wounds after the Napoleonic defeats.
>
> So, Georg Ohm, Heinrich Hertz, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Clausius,
> and Heinrich Lenz took a "back seat"? (All big name 19th century German
> physicist)
Don't forget Albert Einstein,
>
> As did Augustin Fresnel, Pierre Dulong, Alexis Petit, Pierre Curie, and
> Andre Ampere? (Big name 19th century French Physicist)
>
> How... droll. English Chauvinism is not dead.
>
> Yes, there is a reason why back in the 1960s you had to be able to read a
> foreign language, usually German or French, to get a degree in physics at
> an accredited college in the English speaking United States.
>
> And after WW II, the only reason why we had a scientific jump on the
> Russians is because our captured German scientist were better than the
> Russian captured German scientists. :-D
For a time, German and French were the language of science. The only reason
why it is English now is that most research is made in the USA. As soon as
another country spends more money in research, its language will become the
universal language.
Peter T. Daniels
> The use of Latin in the sciences and other learned fields basically
> ceased in the 18th and 19th centuries. I have long wondered why people
> accepted the use of national languages exclusively in this endeavor
> where international understanding is more imperative than any other.
> It is true, that the use of Latin by 1700 had already passed almost
> everywhere else, but its last remaining use should still have been
> enough to support it, given that Latin was the one language that every
> educated man in the Western world knew, and that Latin, having such a
> long tradition of use, was at least suitable for scientific and
> technical purposes as any other language at the time.
What a bizarre scattershot of newsgroups.
The dissertation of the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted,
done ca. 1895 for Adolf Erman in Berlin, was one of the last
dissertations ever written in Latin.
Don Phillipson
news:bcf3d7f5-6451-4007...@g22g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> The British Imperial system of units dominated for a long time for
> practical reasons; those who bought materials for scientific purposes
> specified quantities in pints, gallons, and cubic feet, hence
> suppliers stored and packaged them so.
This appears untrue: no evidence suggests international shippers
of chemicals, metals etc. adopted British measures of length, weight,
volume etc. (The French metric system was adopted in Germany
from the 1840s and German scientific suppliers dominated the
market from the 1880s.)
> . . . which is why a U. S. standard pallet at 40 x
> 48 inches, out of all the other "standard" pallets used worldwide
This ignores the actual evolution of international commercial
standards (best modeled by the current shipping container:
this is not the optimum by any abstract standard: but represented
the cheapest approximation to existing vehicle dimensions,
crane carrying capacity etc.)
> > It is true, that the use of Latin by 1700 had already passed almost
> > everywhere else, but its last remaining use should still have been
> > enough to support it, given that Latin was the one language . . .
> That's because the texts the students were learning from were
> written by people educated in Catholic Church-run schools; you learn
> the language to read the text, meaning you keep your notes in that as
> well. However, you write down military applications in your native
> language.
1. This is prima facie untrue for the UK where Catholic schools were
outlawed until the 1830s.
2. No evidence appears to suggest that Catholic school students
in Germany, France, Austria etc., kept their personal notes in Latin.
Some individuals did, others did not, and Latin was not thus prescribed
by any rule.
3. Military records were not necessarily kept in a language
governed by school rules. Many Russian and German archives
appear to have been maintained in French, perhaps because this
language was standardized earlier than Russian and German.
> > . . . blame it on the French: they abandoned Latin earlier than anyone
> > else, and are well-known to have an inflated view of the greatness of
> > their own language. But that does not seem to explain how it happened
> > everywhere else: had they wanted to emulate the French, they would
> > have started writing in French, and if they had wanted to oppose them,
> > they should have re-emphasised the role of Latin.
> Nonsense; when the English and German courts started emulating the
> manners and dress of the French court, they did not start speaking
> French. Why would they?
Problems:
1. English and German courts hardly ever "emulated" French courts.
They usually did so only at the behest of individual monarchs raised
in French environments (e.g. Charles II of England.)
2. But French was 1800-1950 "the language of diplomacy" viz.
the language in which ambassadors and staffs interacted world-wide
(and diplomatic protocol was modeled on French style: but this continued
just the same whether France was a monarchy or a republic.)
bert
Latin was quite naturally the language of the
textbooks, of study, and of examination in the
universities of Europe from about 1100 onwards,
because these universities were founded by the
Church with the purpose of training men for the
priesthood. But later secular universities (one
of the earliest of which was Edinburgh, founded by
the Town Council in 1583) followed the tradition
of the older ones. Town Council minutes of the
early 1600's lament the poor standard of Latin
scholarship among the student body, and propose
various measures to improve it.
While the use of Latin lasted, Europe enjoyed a
continent-wide interchangeability of university
staff and students, especially since the same
curriculum was followed almost everywhere. Several
famous academics were students in different countries
for different years of their undergraduate careers.
The first professor in Europe to lecture in the
vernacular, instead of in Latin, was Francis
Hutcheson, the Professor of Moral Philosophy at
Glasgow, some time in the early 1730's. His
motivation appears to have been that the use of
Latin constrained the patterns of his students'
thinking, and that the vernacular would let them
think outside this Latin-imposed box. One author
attributes the start of the Scottish Enlightenment
to exactly this newly-provided facility in forming
and expressing fresh ideas.
Whatever the original reason, the abandonment of
Latin then proceeded rapidly through Europe, and was
complete within barely a lifetime. Karl Friedrich
Gauss's doctoral thesis "Disquisitiones Arithmeticae"
of 1797 was the last major scholarly work to be
published in Latin.
I think that this adoption of national languages had
more to do with rising national pride than with any
consensus about the shortcomings of Latin.
--
James Hogg
I doubt if he was the first in Europe. Christian Thomasius started
lecturing in German instead of Latin in 1687.
> His motivation appears to have been that the use of Latin constrained
> the patterns of his students' thinking, and that the vernacular
> would let them think outside this Latin-imposed box. One author
> attributes the start of the Scottish Enlightenment to exactly this
> newly-provided facility in forming and expressing fresh ideas.
>
> Whatever the original reason, the abandonment of Latin then proceeded
> rapidly through Europe, and was complete within barely a lifetime.
> Karl Friedrich Gauss's doctoral thesis "Disquisitiones Arithmeticae"
> of 1797 was the last major scholarly work to be published in Latin.
>
> I think that this adoption of national languages had more to do with
> rising national pride than with any consensus about the shortcomings
> of Latin. --
--
James
Marvin the Martian
> Marvin the Martian wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:05:35 -0800, chazwin wrote:
>>
>>
>>> The 19thC saw the domination of English mainly because nearly all the
>>> decent innovations, discoveries and inventions all came from Britain.
>>> The French and the Germans had to take a back seat. The Germans seemed
>>> to have concentrated on philosophy whilst the French spent the whole
>>> century licking their wounds after the Napoleonic defeats.
>>
>> So, Georg Ohm, Heinrich Hertz, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Clausius,
>> and Heinrich Lenz took a "back seat"? (All big name 19th century German
>> physicist)
>
> Don't forget Albert Einstein,
Einstein was 20th Century. The issue was 19th century physicist. The list
gets longer if you include 20th century.
>> As did Augustin Fresnel, Pierre Dulong, Alexis Petit, Pierre Curie, and
>> Andre Ampere? (Big name 19th century French Physicist)
>>
>> How... droll. English Chauvinism is not dead.
>>
>> Yes, there is a reason why back in the 1960s you had to be able to read
>> a foreign language, usually German or French, to get a degree in
>> physics at an accredited college in the English speaking United States.
>>
>> And after WW II, the only reason why we had a scientific jump on the
>> Russians is because our captured German scientist were better than the
>> Russian captured German scientists. :-D
>
> For a time, German and French were the language of science. The only
> reason why it is English now is that most research is made in the USA.
> As soon as another country spends more money in research, its language
> will become the universal language.
Think CERN.
Peter T. Daniels
> Gauss's doctoral thesis "Disquisitiones Arithmeticae"
> of 1797 was the last major scholarly work to be
> published in Latin.
Who are you to decide what a "major scholarly work" is?
Most of us happen to think that Wilhelm Gesenius's *Thesaurus Linguae
Phoeniciae* (1837) is a major scholarly work (and it treats not just
the Phoenician language, but all that was known of Semitic epigraphy
at the time.) (And don't bother looking at it in google books; they
don't bother to unfold the plates before they photograph them, so the
file is useless.)
Ostap S. B. M. Bender Jr.
In what field? Certainly not in math, science, philosophy, music, art,
cuisine, etc.
French was the overall lingua franca among educated people in the 19th
century. English dominated relatively minor fields like tea-drinking
and crumpet-making.
jmfbahciv
people can make up new words easily. I did this as part of
my job.
/BAH
jmfbahciv
day. Thus word creation and new meanings are expunged from the
language.
/BAH
Peter T. Daniels
I take it you don't know Arabic?
Which newsgroup are you in?
Andrew Usher
> > The third explanation is that English is more versatile. IOW,
> > people can make up new words easily. I did this as part of
> > my job.
>
> I take it you don't know Arabic?
Her 'explanation', if true, is just a variant of my first i.e. the
classicists that control Latin insist on purity over accepting new
words like any living language must.
Andrew Usher
Andrew Usher
> On Dec 24, 5:48 pm, bert <bert.hutchi...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>
> > Gauss's doctoral thesis "Disquisitiones Arithmeticae"
> > of 1797 was the last major scholarly work to be
> > published in Latin.
>
> Who are you to decide what a "major scholarly work" is?
I'm not sure what he means. Anyway, he's made silly errors - DA wasn't
Gauss's dissertation, and Gauss continued to publish his major papers
in Latin until 1832.
> Most of us happen to think that Wilhelm Gesenius's *Thesaurus Linguae
> Phoeniciae* (1837) is a major scholarly work (and it treats not just
> the Phoenician language, but all that was known of Semitic epigraphy
> at the time.) (And don't bother looking at it in google books; they
> don't bother to unfold the plates before they photograph them, so the
> file is useless.)
I'll take your word for it.
Andrew Usher
Andrew Usher
> I think that this adoption of national languages had
> more to do with rising national pride than with any
> consensus about the shortcomings of Latin.
This is kind of my point. My question was why this happened when one
would think that the Enlightenment would lead to more internationalism
among scholars - yet all the major Enlightenment figures wrote in
their vernacular.
Andrew Usher
Andrew Usher
> > The use of Latin in the sciences and other learned fields basically
> > ceased in the 18th and 19th centuries. I have long wondered why people
> > accepted the use of national languages exclusively in this endeavor
> > where international understanding is more imperative than any other.
>
> Languages were not really considered "national" before the
> 20th century. E.g. Galileo was the first scientist of lasting
> historical importance to publish in the vernacular, but this was
> not because Italian or Tuscan was a "national language:" it
> was just more convenient for Galileo's current needs.
Why was it, by the way?
> Cf. (a century later) Newton published in both English in
> 1671 (Fluxions) and 1704 (Optics) and in Latin in 1687
> (Princip. Math.) Another century later Alexander von Humboldt
> chose to publish in French and Latin as well as his native
> German; another century Einstein published only in German.
Note also that the former importance of Latin is shown by the fact
that Newton's Optics, like Galileo's and Descartes' vernacular works,
was translated into Latin almost immediately.
> The suitability of Latin to publish genuinely new information is
> open to challenge. I would suggest Linnaeus's plant catalogue
> (1753-1779) was the last great attempt to use Latin as the
> international language of science. He nevertheless had
> to coin a lot of new words -- and the Linnean System of
> nomenclature worked in any language, thus did not require
> Latin for its adoption or use.
Linnaeus's work was, of course, a complete success. It's no great
surprise that, in any language, new words need to be made in many
cases to express new concepts.
> 20th century scholar Derek de Solla Price was the first to
> notice the growth pattern of modern science (since Galileo
> or Newton) -- a tenfold growth in the volume of new knowledge
> published in each half century. This means the volume of
> information grew a millionfold in 300 years.
Is this perhaps a slight exaggeration? After all, scientists today
publish almost everything they do, unlike earlier times when they did
not need to, because their careers didn't depend on it and there was
no tradition of doing so. I don't think it can be said that the volume
of useful knowledge has increased that rapidly.
> During this period
> investigators have used four successive "languages of science,"
> Latin, French, German and English. I believe the character
> of languages had less to do with this change than the
> contingencies of politics, viz. unique features of the German
> academic system of the 19th century and the American
> research machine of the 20th.
Well French and German were never truly international languages, in
which scientists the world over wrote their discoveries in. But Latin
did have that status once, and English does today. The issue of where
the largest volume of research was is different; and that was the
reason for the apparent dominance of German in the 19th and early 20th
century.
> Non-scientists tried to go their own way by maintaining
> Latin as the core of higher education (e.g. prerequisite
> for admission to Oxbridge up to about 1960) and from
> about 1800 adding Greek (which among late Victorians
> displaced Latin as the preferred language for show-off
> quotations) and adding to the "research" curriculum a
> whole lot of Middle Eastern languages reconstructed
> from writing (also handy for Biblical scholarship, a hot
> topic i the 19th century) not to mention Persian, Sanskrit,
> and Chinese and Japanese studies besides. This
> offered a curriculum that appeared competitive with
> hot science in the Victorian period -- but which failed to
> transform the whole world the way science successfully
> did: and never supported any scholarly lingua franca.
Right, and this is where Latin gained its horrible reputation -
generations of students were forced to learn Latin as a dead language,
by dubious educational methods that gave few students real fluency,
all to satisfy the snob-appeal of a 'classical' education.
Andrew Usher
Yusuf B Gursey
I read that the Latin of the Vatican continuously makes up new words,
as well as the Latin used for taxonomy. ditto for Modern Standard
Arabic, which is very closely based on Classical Arabic, and spoken
Arabic is quite divergent from it. there is also Neo-Syriac. Israeli
Hebrew is rather more deviant from Biblical Hebrew though.
why isn't this cross-posted to a medical or biological NG? Latin based
coinages are AFAIK more alive in those fields. philosophy tends, AFAIK
towards german. particle physics is inovative: quark (a fundamental
particle, IIRC from a type of german cheese, but based on a miss-
quotation from James Joyce) and "color" and "flavor",(characteristics
of quarks, it is said that inspired by ice-cream types that came in
different colors and flavors while the theoretician was musing over
the theory). ironically, the man responsible for these coinages is
seriously interested in linguistics.
Don Phillipson
> > 20th century scholar Derek de Solla Price was the first to
> > notice the growth pattern of modern science (since Galileo
> > or Newton) -- a tenfold growth in the volume of new knowledge
> > published in each half century. This means the volume of
> > information grew a millionfold in 300 years.
>
> Is this perhaps a slight exaggeration? After all, scientists today
> publish almost everything they do, unlike earlier times when they did
> not need to, because their careers didn't depend on it and there was
> no tradition of doing so. I don't think it can be said that the volume
> of useful knowledge has increased that rapidly.
Price dealt with this. We have no agreed standards for "usefulness."
Price simply measured the volume of published knowledge (his first
sample being pages published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society
of London 166? to 1960.) The figure of tenfold growth in each of six
successive half centuries seems to have been confirmed several
times (and we could by now count at least 350 years.)
Price's practical point is that exponential growth never goes on
for ever, as observed in nature: meaning we may live into the
period when something happens to this growth pattern in total
knowledge. See interesting discussion in his Science Since
Babylon (1970, 1975) and Little Science, Big Science (1986, 1990)
both highly recommended.
Peter T. Daniels
> On Dec 25, 10:45 am, Andrew Usher <k_over_hb...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > > > The third explanation is that English is more versatile. IOW,
> > > > people can make up new words easily. I did this as part of
> > > > my job.
>
> > > I take it you don't know Arabic?
>
> > Her 'explanation', if true, is just a variant of my first i.e. the
> > classicists that control Latin insist on purity over accepting new
> > words like any living language must.
>
> > Andrew Usher
>
> I read that the Latin of the Vatican continuously makes up new words,
There's a Latin radio station in Finland.
> as well as the Latin used for taxonomy. ditto for Modern Standard
> Arabic, which is very closely based on Classical Arabic, and spoken
> Arabic is quite divergent from it. there is also Neo-Syriac. Israeli
> Hebrew is rather more deviant from Biblical Hebrew though.
What does Neo-Syriac (or any form of Modern Aramaic) have to do with
the creation of modern scientific vocabulary?
Israeli scholars do publish in Hebrew, but they realize that if
they're going to get an international hearing, they have to publish in
English (or maybe French -- when Israel was founded in 1948, its third
official language was French rather than English).
> why isn't this cross-posted to a medical or biological NG? Latin based
> coinages are AFAIK more alive in those fields. philosophy tends, AFAIK
> towards german. particle physics is inovative: quark (a fundamental
> particle, IIRC from a type of german cheese, but based on a miss-
Did Gell-Mann ever claim any connection with Ger. Quark??
> quotation from James Joyce) and "color" and "flavor",(characteristics
Joyce _didn't_ write "three quarks for Mister Mork"?
> of quarks, it is said that inspired by ice-cream types that came in
> different colors and flavors while the theoretician was musing over
> the theory). ironically, the man responsible for these coinages is
> seriously interested in linguistics.
Unfortunately he fell in with a "linguist" who is not taken seriously.
James Hogg
Strictly speaking, he wrote "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"
--
James
Peter T. Daniels
Yeah, that's how I've seen it. So what's the misquotation?
Mahipal7638
Obviously, there's no misquotation given the "_didn't_" in your line.
Get over it, and thanks for not being a regular in sci.physics for you
would be a visual, given Usenet is the medium it is, pain.
Enjo(y)...
--
Mahipal
Robert Bannister
Moreover, particularly in Germany, many of them translated their names
into Latin or Greek.
--
Rob Bannister
Yusuf B Gursey
> On Dec 25, 11:43 am, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Dec 25, 10:45 am, Andrew Usher <k_over_hb...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > > Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > > > > The third explanation is that English is more versatile. IOW,
> > > > > people can make up new words easily. I did this as part of
> > > > > my job.
>
> > > > I take it you don't know Arabic?
>
> > > Her 'explanation', if true, is just a variant of my first i.e. the
> > > classicists that control Latin insist on purity over accepting new
> > > words like any living language must.
>
> > > Andrew Usher
>
> > I read that the Latin of the Vatican continuously makes up new words,
>
> There's a Latin radio station in Finland.
>
> > as well as the Latin used for taxonomy. ditto for Modern Standard
> > Arabic, which is very closely based on Classical Arabic, and spoken
> > Arabic is quite divergent from it. there is also Neo-Syriac. Israeli
> > Hebrew is rather more deviant from Biblical Hebrew though.
>
> What does Neo-Syriac (or any form of Modern Aramaic) have to do with
> the creation of modern scientific vocabulary?
>
I was talking about classical languages that have been revived for
everyday use, including terms for new technology, not neccessarily at
that point about scientific vocabulary, which I get into later.
> Israeli scholars do publish in Hebrew, but they realize that if
> they're going to get an international hearing, they have to publish in
> English (or maybe French -- when Israel was founded in 1948, its third
> official language was French rather than English).
>
> > why isn't this cross-posted to a medical or biological NG? Latin based
> > coinages are AFAIK more alive in those fields. philosophy tends, AFAIK
> > towards german. particle physics is inovative: quark (a fundamental
> > particle, IIRC from a type of german cheese, but based on a miss-
>
> Did Gell-Mann ever claim any connection with Ger. Quark??
no, he didn't.
Androcles
"Yusuf B Gursey" <y...@theworld.com> wrote in message
news:aecefd83-1be6-41af...@g26g2000yqe.googlegroups.com...
On Dec 25, 1:54 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Dec 25, 11:43 am, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Dec 25, 10:45 am, Andrew Usher <k_over_hb...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > > Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > > > > The third explanation is that English is more versatile. IOW,
> > > > > people can make up new words easily. I did this as part of
> > > > > my job.
>
> > > > I take it you don't know Arabic?
>
> > > Her 'explanation', if true, is just a variant of my first i.e. the
> > > classicists that control Latin insist on purity over accepting new
> > > words like any living language must.
>
> > > Andrew Usher
>
> > I read that the Latin of the Vatican continuously makes up new words,
>
> There's a Latin radio station in Finland.
>
> > as well as the Latin used for taxonomy. ditto for Modern Standard
> > Arabic, which is very closely based on Classical Arabic, and spoken
> > Arabic is quite divergent from it. there is also Neo-Syriac. Israeli
> > Hebrew is rather more deviant from Biblical Hebrew though.
>
> What does Neo-Syriac (or any form of Modern Aramaic) have to do with
> the creation of modern scientific vocabulary?
>
I was talking about classical languages
====================================
That's just great, by WHY are you posting to sci.physics?
Are you so fuckin' stupid that you don't realise it's off-topic?
Yusuf B Gursey
> "Yusuf B Gursey" <y...@theworld.com> wrote in messagenews:aecefd83-1be6-41af...@g26g2000yqe.googlegroups.com...
OK. I didn't look at the NG's.
Yusuf B Gursey
true, Arabic invents words for everyday technological words, but there
is considerable amount of simple borrowing in higher scientific
terminology. there is no calque, for example, for "oxygen".
"electricity" is kahriba:' from the persian word for "amber", but
kahrab or kuhayrib (the diminutive form) did not catch on for
"electron" or "electronic".
Peter T. Daniels
At least the Indians in sci.lang can write intelligible English. I
have no idea what you just said.
Peter T. Daniels
> On Dec 25, 1:54 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Dec 25, 11:43 am, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> wrote:
>
> > > On Dec 25, 10:45 am, Andrew Usher <k_over_hb...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > > > Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > > > > > The third explanation is that English is more versatile. IOW,
> > > > > > people can make up new words easily. I did this as part of
> > > > > > my job.
>
> > > > > I take it you don't know Arabic?
>
> > > > Her 'explanation', if true, is just a variant of my first i.e. the
> > > > classicists that control Latin insist on purity over accepting new
> > > > words like any living language must.
>
> > > > Andrew Usher
>
> > > I read that the Latin of the Vatican continuously makes up new words,
>
> > There's a Latin radio station in Finland.
>
> > > as well as the Latin used for taxonomy. ditto for Modern Standard
> > > Arabic, which is very closely based on Classical Arabic, and spoken
> > > Arabic is quite divergent from it. there is also Neo-Syriac. Israeli
> > > Hebrew is rather more deviant from Biblical Hebrew though.
>
> > What does Neo-Syriac (or any form of Modern Aramaic) have to do with
> > the creation of modern scientific vocabulary?
>
> I was talking about classical languages that have been revived for
> everyday use, including terms for new technology, not neccessarily at
> that point about scientific vocabulary, which I get into later.
Modern Aramaic is not a classical language that has been revived for
everyday use, so what's your point?
> > Israeli scholars do publish in Hebrew, but they realize that if
> > they're going to get an international hearing, they have to publish in
> > English (or maybe French -- when Israel was founded in 1948, its third
> > official language was French rather than English).
>
> > > why isn't this cross-posted to a medical or biological NG? Latin based
> > > coinages are AFAIK more alive in those fields. philosophy tends, AFAIK
> > > towards german. particle physics is inovative: quark (a fundamental
> > > particle, IIRC from a type of german cheese, but based on a miss-
>
> > Did Gell-Mann ever claim any connection with Ger. Quark??
>
> no, he didn't.
Then why did you say he did?
> > > quotation from James Joyce) and "color" and "flavor",(characteristics
>
> > Joyce _didn't_ write "three quarks for Mister Mork"?
>
> > > of quarks, it is said that inspired by ice-cream types that came in
> > > different colors and flavors while the theoretician was musing over
> > > the theory). ironically, the man responsible for these coinages is
> > > seriously interested in linguistics.
>
> > Unfortunately he fell in with a "linguist" who is not taken seriously.-
Peter T. Daniels
Why don't you abuse the person who actually created the crossposting?
Just recently, there was a long thread in sci.lang and
alt.usage.english about the word for "oxygen" in various languages, in
which it was repeatedly asserted, without contradiction, that
scientists understand the etymologies of their technical terminology.
Obviously that was a false assumption.
But if you don't know the history of physics, you're a pretty poor
physicist.
Yusuf B Gursey
I said the word was from German, not that Gell-Mann claimed the
connection.
Andrew Usher
> Just recently, there was a long thread in sci.lang and
> alt.usage.english about the word for "oxygen" in various languages, in
> which it was repeatedly asserted, without contradiction, that
> scientists understand the etymologies of their technical terminology.
> Obviously that was a false assumption.
>
> But if you don't know the history of physics, you're a pretty poor
> physicist.
He's not a physicist. He's a crank, which makes it pretty hypocritical
that he would complain about 'off-topic'' postings.
Andrew Usher
Andrew Usher
> Price dealt with this. We have no agreed standards for "usefulness."
Can you provide the reference, or should I find it myself?
> Price simply measured the volume of published knowledge (his first
> sample being pages published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society
> of London 166? to 1960.)
OK, so he's measuring journals. Well, in the 17th century, most new
scientific knowledge was not published in journals. It took quite some
time before it became the universal standard that new discoveries
should be put into journals.
> The figure of tenfold growth in each of six
> successive half centuries seems to have been confirmed several
> times (and we could by now count at least 350 years.)
Well that's a millionfold total. There certainly hasn't been a
millionfold growth in the number of scientists (there are probably not
more than a million in the world today).
> Price's practical point is that exponential growth never goes on
> for ever, as observed in nature: meaning we may live into the
> period when something happens to this growth pattern in total
> knowledge.
Right, no exponential growth continues forever, except maybe that of
the universe, though some doubts have been raised about that (
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.astro/browse_thread/thread/ef2e19c198e428c1#
). There sure seems to be a lot of people that don't get it when
applied to various fields such as demographics, economics, or
technology, though.
> See interesting discussion in his Science Since
> Babylon (1970, 1975) and Little Science, Big Science (1986, 1990)
> both highly recommended.
I shall look.
Andrew Usher
Joachim Pense
>>
> The third explanation is that English is more versatile. IOW,
> people can make up new words easily. I did this as part of
> my job.
>
Greek is versatile in making up new words by composition, and that's what
western scientists did until recently. They mixed a lot of Latin words into
this procedure, too. Chinese has been used for the same purpose in the
east, and still is, (e. g., in Japan.)
Joachim
Joachim Pense
>
> At least the Indians in sci.lang can write intelligible English.
Like Purl Gurl?
Joachim
PaulJK
I am only guessing that Peter meant Indian Indians.
pjk
I.N. Galidakis
[snip]
> Greek is versatile in making up new words by composition, and that's what
> western scientists did until recently.
Here's a graphical example which partially shows this versatility, for those who
can follow it:
http://ioannis.virtualcomposer2000.com/writing/definition.html
For general cultural exchange, I'd say it's pretty obvious that the most
versatile one is American-English, because its bastardization is phenomenal. At
least as witnessed by this author, after spending 10 years there.
That, which is bastardized and mutated the most is the one which adapts and
survives the longest.
It's probably not an accident that the net is predominantly English.
> Joachim
--
Ioannis
Joachim Pense
You'll get a barnstar for grasping my joke.
Joachim
Ostap S. B. M. Bender Jr.
> Ostap S. B. M. Bender Jr. wrote:
>
> > On Dec 24, 8:05 am, chazwin <chazwy...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> Latin provided an invaluable tool for the transmission of ideas
> >> throughout Europe, not bound my the restrictions of parochial
> >> languages long before the Enlightenment. This together with the
> >> invention of printing was the way that the Reformation exploded right
> >> across Europe without the need for learning all the various languages
> >> that were still unformed.
> >> Latin's use was maintained long into the 18thC. It use continued in
> >> Botany and other sciences in the coining of neologisms , and is still
> >> in use to this day.
> >> The 19thC saw the domination of English
>
> > In what field? Certainly not in math, science, philosophy, music, art,
> > cuisine, etc.
>
> > French was the overall lingua franca among educated people in the 19th
> > century. English dominated relatively minor fields like tea-drinking
> > and crumpet-making.
>
> And it stultified. France elides all words which aren't French to this
> day. Thus word creation and new meanings are expunged from the
> language.
>
What is the relevance between what I said and what you wrote?
Peter T. Daniels
> On Dec 25, 11:11 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > On Dec 25, 8:01 pm, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> wrote:
> > > On Dec 25, 1:54 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > > > On Dec 25, 11:43 am, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> wrote:
> > > > > why isn't this cross-posted to a medical or biological NG? Latin based
> > > > > coinages are AFAIK more alive in those fields. philosophy tends, AFAIK
> > > > > towards german. particle physics is inovative: quark (a fundamental
> > > > > particle, IIRC from a type of german cheese, but based on a miss-
>
> > > > Did Gell-Mann ever claim any connection with Ger. Quark??
>
> > > no, he didn't.
>
> > Then why did you say he did?
>
> I said the word was from German, not that Gell-Mann claimed the
> connection.
So now it's your claim that Joyce was writing about three cottage-
cheeses for Muster Mark?
Peter T. Daniels
> Joachim Pense wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > Greek is versatile in making up new words by composition, and that's what
> > western scientists did until recently.
>
> Here's a graphical example which partially shows this versatility, for those who
> can follow it:
By "follow," you mean 'read the Greek language'. And it's not a
graphical example, it's a list.
> http://ioannis.virtualcomposer2000.com/writing/definition.html
>
> For general cultural exchange, I'd say it's pretty obvious that the most
> versatile one is American-English, because its bastardization is phenomenal. At
> least as witnessed by this author, after spending 10 years there.
>
> That, which is bastardized and mutated the most is the one which adapts and
> survives the longest.
Anyone who refers to the borrowing of words between languages in
contact as "bastardization" needs to learn a little linguistics before
posting to sci.lang again. (Though you'd be at home in a small corner
of alt.usage.english.)
Peter T. Daniels
Ah.
jmfbahciv
> On Dec 25, 10:00 am, jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv@aol> wrote:
>> people can make up new words easily. I did this as part of
>> my job.
>
Correct. But what does this question have to do with why
English, or American ;-), is the language used as a default language?
>
> Which newsgroup are you in?
sci.physics.
/BAH
jmfbahciv
A side effect of WWII's outcome is that a lot of the work done
in science and new technology was done in the US. Guess who
got to name stuff? Then businesses used the results of their
work and started to sell it to the rest of the world. Guess
which nouns, verbs, adjectives (in some cases, adverbs) were
used in meetings and advertising?
/BAH
jmfbahciv
hard/software during the 50s, 60s, 70s. If you think about it,
we didn't use English but shorthand forms of cybercurd (my word
for cybercruft). The documentation, which was shipped with
the hard/software, was written in American (not English). This
last sentence is very important because of the nouns used
to describe components and other aspects covered in our
specifications.
JMF and I went on a cruise which included a trip to Beijing. We
visited a Children's Palace and discovered a room full of
kids younger than 6 typing on Apple computers. We could
read their code. JMF had a fine discussion about computers
with the teacher; neither knew the other's oral language.
/BAH
Yusuf B Gursey
I don't have any idea what Joyce had in mind, but I know that quark is
a type of cheese in German.
jmfbahciv
almost impossible to do useful things in an efficient manner.
You are not allowed to create new words until they are
approved by some commission years later (can't recall the
name).
/BAH
/BAH
Zerkon
> And so, some explanations suggest themselves. The first is that the
> predominant advocates and defenders of Latin, from the Renaissance to
> now, are from the humanities; and so once Latin had disappeared from
> live literary use, their support was no longer important.
The Roman Empire.
I.N. Galidakis
> On Dec 26, 3:05 am, "I.N. Galidakis" <morph...@olympus.mons> wrote:
>> Joachim Pense wrote:
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>>> Greek is versatile in making up new words by composition, and that's what
>>> western scientists did until recently.
>>
>> Here's a graphical example which partially shows this versatility, for those
>> who can follow it:
>
> By "follow," you mean 'read the Greek language'. And it's not a
> graphical example, it's a list.
>
>> http://ioannis.virtualcomposer2000.com/writing/definition.html
Actually, no, one does not need to 'read the Greek language' to follow this
page. The translation of the original definition is given on top. The rest is
just repeated applications of the same definition, with "X" being replaced by
the noun the definition uses and with the appropriate conjuctions added using a
different color. That's what I meant by "graphical".
I just thought the majority of the readers would be keen enough to notice.
Apparently not.
>> For general cultural exchange, I'd say it's pretty obvious that the most
>> versatile one is American-English, because its bastardization is phenomenal.
>> At least as witnessed by this author, after spending 10 years there.
>>
>> That, which is bastardized and mutated the most is the one which adapts and
>> survives the longest.
>
> Anyone who refers to the borrowing of words between languages in
> contact as "bastardization" needs to learn a little linguistics before
> posting to sci.lang again. (Though you'd be at home in a small corner
> of alt.usage.english.)
Mea Culpa! Next time I decide to post to sci.lang, I'll make sure to email you
for permissions first, before I get my second degree in linguistics.
--
Ioannis
Peter T. Daniels
Everyone knows that. But it has nothing to do with the name of the
subatomic particle, unless Joyce was referencing it in that passage.
Peter T. Daniels
It has to do with the claim that English is "more versatile" (scil.
than other world languages) in its ability to "make up new words
easily."
A claim that English borrows (assimilates) words from other languages
more easily than other world languages is more legitimate.
Peter T. Daniels
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > On Dec 26, 3:05 am, "I.N. Galidakis" <morph...@olympus.mons> wrote:
> >> Joachim Pense wrote:
>
> >> [snip]
>
> >>> Greek is versatile in making up new words by composition, and that's what
> >>> western scientists did until recently.
>
> >> Here's a graphical example which partially shows this versatility, for those
> >> who can follow it:
>
> > By "follow," you mean 'read the Greek language'. And it's not a
> > graphical example, it's a list.
>
> >>http://ioannis.virtualcomposer2000.com/writing/definition.html
>
> Actually, no, one does not need to 'read the Greek language' to follow this
> page. The translation of the original definition is given on top. The rest is
> just repeated applications of the same definition, with "X" being replaced by
> the noun the definition uses and with the appropriate conjuctions added using a
> different color. That's what I meant by "graphical".
Didn't you learn in science that definition by enumeration is
unacceptable?
"Graphic" would usually refer to a diagram, graph, or chart.
> I just thought the majority of the readers would be keen enough to notice.
> Apparently not.
So you also apply the fallacy of deriving a general principle from an
individual example? You do not have the slightest idea what "the
majority of the readers" would or would not be keen enough to notice.
> >> For general cultural exchange, I'd say it's pretty obvious that the most
> >> versatile one is American-English, because its bastardization is phenomenal.
> >> At least as witnessed by this author, after spending 10 years there.
>
> >> That, which is bastardized and mutated the most is the one which adapts and
> >> survives the longest.
>
> > Anyone who refers to the borrowing of words between languages in
> > contact as "bastardization" needs to learn a little linguistics before
> > posting to sci.lang again. (Though you'd be at home in a small corner
> > of alt.usage.english.)
>
> Mea Culpa! Next time I decide to post to sci.lang, I'll make sure to email you
> for permissions first, before I get my second degree in linguistics.
Your first degree in linguistics seems not to have taught you much, if
anything.
garabik-ne...@kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk
> Didn't you learn in science that definition by enumeration is
> unacceptable?
On the contrary, in mathematics, definition by enumerating axioms
is THE acceptable way (granted, you probably did not mean _this_)...
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
| Radovan Garabík http://kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk/~garabik/ |
| __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk |
-----------------------------------------------------------
Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus.
Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread!
Yusuf B Gursey
IMHO he might have been.
Yusuf B Gursey
on another note, I had heard that the politicians and other
bureaucrats in charge of funding had complained that such names as
"quark", "flavor" and "charm" (the last invented by another particle
physicist) made their endaevors sound frivolous to those in charge of
the funding.
chazwin
>
> Science, enlightened or not, is Language independent, Language
> indifferent, Latin or otherwise.
All thinking is language dependant.
>
> One can arbitrarily translate scientific thought, it's not poetry,
> from one Language to another.
So naive.
>
> Enjo(y)...
> --
> Mahipalhttp://mahipal7638.wordpress.com/meforce/
chazwin
> On Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:05:35 -0800, chazwin wrote:
> > The 19thC saw the domination of English mainly because nearly all the
> > decent innovations, discoveries and inventions all came from Britain.
> > The French and the Germans had to take a back seat. The Germans seemed
> > to have concentrated on philosophy whilst the French spent the whole
> > century licking their wounds after the Napoleonic defeats.
>
> So, Georg Ohm, Heinrich Hertz, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Clausius,
> and Heinrich Lenz took a "back seat"? (All big name 19th century German
> physicist)
Yep -minor players.
>
> As did Augustin Fresnel, Pierre Dulong, Alexis Petit, Pierre Curie, and
> Andre Ampere? (Big name 19th century French Physicist)
And them too.
>
> How... droll. English Chauvinism is not dead.
>
> Yes, there is a reason why back in the 1960s you had to be able to read a
> foreign language, usually German or French, to get a degree in physics at
> an accredited college in the English speaking United States.
Yes but it did not matter which one. In Germany and France English was
essential.
>
> And after WW II, the only reason why we had a scientific jump on the
> Russians is because our captured German scientist were better than the
> Russian captured German scientists. :-D
Can I remind you I was talking about the 19thCentury not the 20thC?
Peter T. Daniels
wrote:
> In sci.lang Peter T. Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > Didn't you learn in science that definition by enumeration is
> > unacceptable?
>
> On the contrary, in mathematics, definition by enumerating axioms
> is THE acceptable way (granted, you probably did not mean _this_)...
I meant listing all the examples you know of, and not mentioning
anything similar that might, but doesn't, fit the pattern.
I restored aue because there are a couple of postings in the thread
from an aue'er.
Peter T. Daniels
Does making art not count as thinking?
> > One can arbitrarily translate scientific thought, it's not poetry,
> > from one Language to another.
>
> So naive.
It's an axiom of modern linguistics (and it has never been disproved)
that anything that can be said in any one language can also be said in
any other language -- you may need to introduce new vocabulary to
cover new concepts and realia (but the concepts can be explained with
paraphrases, just as is done in both philosophy and science), but
that's a trivial matter.
Ace0f_5pades
> On Dec 24, 5:48 pm, bert <bert.hutchi...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>
> > Gauss's doctoral thesis "Disquisitiones Arithmeticae"
> > of 1797 was the last major scholarly work to be
> > published in Latin.
>
> Who are you to decide what a "major scholarly work" is?
>
> Most of us happen to think that Wilhelm Gesenius's *Thesaurus Linguae
> Phoeniciae* (1837) is a major scholarly work (and it treats not just
> the Phoenician language, but all that was known of Semitic epigraphy
> at the time.) (And don't bother looking at it in google books; they
> don't bother to unfold the plates before they photograph them, so the
> file is useless.)
I agree,
and it seems people can't see the forest for the trees.
Ace0f_5pades
<ostap_bender_1...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 24, 8:05 am, chazwin <chazwy...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > throughout Europe, not bound my the restrictions of parochial
> > languages long before the Enlightenment. This together with the
> > invention of printing was the way that the Reformation exploded right
> > across Europe without the need for learning all the various languages
> > that were still unformed.
> > Latin's use was maintained long into the 18thC. It use continued in
> > Botany and other sciences in the coining of neologisms , and is still
> > in use to this day.
>
> cuisine, etc.
>
> French was the overall lingua franca among educated people in the 19th
> century. English dominated relatively minor fields like tea-drinking
> and crumpet-making.
>
>
>
>
>
> > decent innovations, discoveries and inventions all came from Britain.
> > The French and the Germans had to take a back seat. The Germans seemed
> > to have concentrated on philosophy whilst the French spent the whole
>
> - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
here's just one point in case. and there are a NewGroup full
Robert Bannister
>
> All thinking is language dependant.
I have serious doubts about that unless you think that thinking you're
hungry isn't thinking.
--
Rob Bannister
DKleinecke
> chazwin wrote:
>
> > All thinking is language dependant.
>
There is a lot of that going around. People who think verbally tend to
think people who think in other modes aren't thinking.
In mathematics there have always been algebraists who think verbally
and geometers who think in pictures. This has been understood now, by
mathematicians, for a long time and both sides make adjustments. It
appears that about 75% of mathematicians think verbally and 25%
visually.
Outside of mathematics this puts visually minded people in a minority
like left-handed people. A lot of educators think they must be taught
do things the right way.
But visually-minded people are in a worse fix than left-handed people
because their thinking is considered as not thinking at all. But they
learn to cope.
It is possible that many linguists are visually-minded people who had
to focus much more intensely on language in order to get along and
learned how fascinating the whole thing is.
Peter Moylan
> On Dec 26, 4:41 pm, Robert Bannister <robb...@bigpond.com> wrote:
>> chazwin wrote:
>>
>>> All thinking is language dependant.
>>
>
> There is a lot of that going around. People who think verbally tend to
> think people who think in other modes aren't thinking.
>
> In mathematics there have always been algebraists who think verbally
> and geometers who think in pictures. This has been understood now, by
> mathematicians, for a long time and both sides make adjustments. It
> appears that about 75% of mathematicians think verbally and 25%
> visually.
>
> Outside of mathematics this puts visually minded people in a minority
> like left-handed people. A lot of educators think they must be taught
> do things the right way.
If visually minded people are in a minority, there must be two different
meanings of "visually minded".
I've found that I belong to that minority of people who have trouble
imagining a picture in their mind. I can't, for example, mentally form a
picture of the face of somebody I know well. My visual memory is
terrible. My auditory memory, on the other hand, is pretty good.
As far as I know, most people do have the ability to imagine a scene in
a photographic way. Whenever I mention it, everyone is surprised that I
don't see in pictures. It seems that the vast majority of people are
visually minded in the sense I'm thinking of.
My lack doesn't hinder my ability to think geometrically. I can easily
picture a diagram. Perhaps "picture" is the wrong word, though, because
I'm probably seeing that diagram as an interlinked set of symbols rather
than as a projection onto a three-dimensional or two-dimensional image
space.
I'm curious to know whether there is any connection between "visually
minded" in the sense used above in reference to mathematics, and
"visually minded" in the sense that makes one a good artist.
--
Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org
For an e-mail address, see my web page.
Yusuf B Gursey
> Andrew Usher wrote:
> > bert wrote:
>
> >> I think that this adoption of national languages had
> >> more to do with rising national pride than with any
> >> consensus about the shortcomings of Latin.
>
> > This is kind of my point. My question was why this happened when one
> > would think that the Enlightenment would lead to more internationalism
> > among scholars - yet all the major Enlightenment figures wrote in
> > their vernacular.
>
> Moreover, particularly in Germany, many of them translated their names
> into Latin or Greek.
>
but the German Romantics were for the vernacular (German) and were
very anti-Latin, and eventually a language reform movement started in
Germany removing many Latin or Romance based words, and Germanizing
scientific terminology.
> --
>
> Rob Bannister
PaulJK
> chazwin wrote:
>
>> All thinking is language dependant.
>
> I have serious doubts about that unless you think that thinking you're
> hungry isn't thinking.
I guess it turns tricky, if you make frequent spelling mistakes in your thinking. :-)
pjk
Ostap S. B. M. Bender Jr.
Why do you care?
John Stafford
ask a stupid question.
When Latin fell from favor for international communication, scholarly or
other, in what field (if any in particular) did it fail first? Was Latin
particularly useful in the physical sciences or the philosophical
discourse when it began its decline?
TIA
Marvin the Martian
> The French make it almost
> impossible to do useful things in an efficient manner. You are not
> allowed to create new words until they are approved by some commission
> years later (can't recall the name).
Academie francaise. Sorry, I can't do the French characters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionnaire_de_l%27Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%
A7aise
This does have advantages. For one thing, the Engs and the Americans
butcher the English language. Real English has a limited set of phonemes,
but the Engs and the Americans have this nasty habit of using every
phoneme from every language. And they're starting to insist that foreign
pronunciations be used. They're completely ignorant that there often are
more than one dialect in a language; for example, Spanish.
Another benefit is that the Engs (Engs live in Eng-land, right?) and
Americans use words incorrectly, and the incorrect usage becomes
"correct" because they're so fond of "descriptive" dictionaries rather
than proscriptive dictionaries. It's very democratic, the idiots get to
decide what words mean. It's one big Archie Bunker joke. For example, to
"protest" means to testify FOR something. In idiot speak, to "protest the
war" means to speak against the war when the real meaning is to speak FOR
the war.
Lastly, it is hoped that having a panel such as the French Academy would
prevent fad gibberish words like "bling-bling" from reaching the
dictionary. Don't even get me started on how "Ebonics" is being passed
off as English.
The only real downside to the French Academy is that idiots who don't use
the language properly are called idiots. Is that so wrong?
Marvin the Martian
You had me going. I thought you were serious. I see it is just silly
nationalistic posturing.
Peter T. Daniels
Well, Goethe, Hegel, and Kant didn't write in Latin, and they were
certainly influential in philosophy (and probably not the first to
abandon Latin).
Peter T. Daniels
> On Sat, 26 Dec 2009 10:17:37 -0500, jmfbahciv wrote:
> > The French make it almost
> > impossible to do useful things in an efficient manner. You are not
> > allowed to create new words until they are approved by some commission
> > years later (can't recall the name).
>
> Academie francaise. Sorry, I can't do the French characters.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionnaire_de_l%27Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%
> A7aise
>
> This does have advantages. For one thing, the Engs and the Americans
> butcher the English language. Real English has a limited set of phonemes,
> but the Engs and the Americans have this nasty habit of using every
> phoneme from every language. And they're starting to insist that foreign
> pronunciations be used. They're completely ignorant that there often are
> more than one dialect in a language; for example, Spanish.
Please don't use words you don't understand (such as "phoneme").
> Another benefit is that the Engs (Engs live in Eng-land, right?) and
> Americans use words incorrectly, and the incorrect usage becomes
> "correct" because they're so fond of "descriptive" dictionaries rather
> than proscriptive dictionaries. It's very democratic, the idiots get to
> decide what words mean. It's one big Archie Bunker joke. For example, to
> "protest" means to testify FOR something. In idiot speak, to "protest the
> war" means to speak against the war when the real meaning is to speak FOR
> the war.
Please don't expatiate on things you know nothing of. And pick up an
elementary introduction to linguistics. (Just about any book by David
Crystal or Jean Aitchison would be helpful.)
> Lastly, it is hoped that having a panel such as the French Academy would
> prevent fad gibberish words like "bling-bling" from reaching the
> dictionary. Don't even get me started on how "Ebonics" is being passed
> off as English.
No danger of that, since no such thing is happening. (Nor was it
happening when the stupid name "Ebonics" was invented.)
> The only real downside to the French Academy is that idiots who don't use
> the language properly are called idiots. Is that so wrong?
Have you ever heard of King Canute?
Dennis
> The use of Latin in the sciences and other learned fields basically
> ceased in the 18th and 19th centuries. I have long wondered why people
> accepted the use of national languages exclusively in this endeavor
> where international understanding is more imperative than any other.
> It is true, that the use of Latin by 1700 had already passed almost
> everywhere else, but its last remaining use should still have been
> enough to support it, given that Latin was the one language that every
> educated man in the Western world knew, and that Latin, having such a
> long tradition of use, was at least suitable for scientific and
> technical purposes as any other language at the time.
Is it really true that international understanding is more
important here than elsewhere? ISTM you're right but I wonder.
In English and other languages a lot of scientific vocabulary is
drawn from Latin, though somewhat less in German, which has been a pre-
eminent language of science.
I think Peter Daniels is right, you can express the ideas of
science in any language, though historically a lot of scientific
vocabulary has Latin/Greek roots, with the exceptions noted.
> And so, some explanations suggest themselves. The first is that the
> predominant advocates and defenders of Latin, from the Renaissance to
> now, are from the humanities; and so once Latin had disappeared from
> live literary use, their support was no longer important.
I think it's the other way around; people in the humanities are the
ones who adopted national languages!
I'm trying to think of examples of scientific works in Latin.
Newton and Leibnitz wrote in Latin, of course, but Descartes did his work
in French, and Galileo in Italian. I think somewhat Swedenborg wrote
scientific works in Latin, but he was probably the very last one.
> The second
> is to blame it on the French: they abandoned Latin earlier than anyone
> else, and are well-known to have an inflated view of the greatness of
> their own language. But that does not seem to explain how it happened
> everywhere else: had they wanted to emulate the French, they would
> have started writing in French, and if they had wanted to oppose them,
> they should have re-emphasised the role of Latin.
More likely the explanation lies in the history of the development
of science, and the groups that supported it, such as the British Academy
of Sciences. It may simply be that the use of Latin was too far gone in
general by the time experimental science really got going, in the 1700's.
I don't know enough to comment further.
Dennis
Peter T. Daniels
> On Dec 26, 11:40 pm, Marvin the Martian <mar...@ontomars.org> wrote:
> > This does have advantages. For one thing, the Engs and the Americans
> > butcher the English language. Real English has a limited set of phonemes,
> > but the Engs and the Americans have this nasty habit of using every
> > phoneme from every language. And they're starting to insist that foreign
> > pronunciations be used. They're completely ignorant that there often are
> > more than one dialect in a language; for example, Spanish.
>
> Please don't use words you don't understand (such as "phoneme").
English hasn't added a (consonantal) phoneme since the 12th century or
so, when the distinction between s and z (and the other similar pairs)
was taken over with borrowings of French words.
Chuck Riggs
wrote:
Did an AUE member add all these newsgroups to the thread?
I knew an American Indian who thought and dreamed mainly in pictures.
He told me that was common in his tribe. I suspect this proclivity
would come in handy when associating names and faces, among other
things. It is a skill I am poor at, for I think almost exclusively in
words.
Is being hungry, as I am now, a form of thinking or do I tell myself,
"I am hungry"? It is my brain, yet I don't know.
--
Regards,
Chuck Riggs,
An American who lives near Dublin, Ireland and usually spells in BrE
jmfbahciv
However, that is one of the reasons English was used to describe
science and technical specs instead of another Western Civ
language. There are no government rules that prevent creation
of new words in countries where some form of English is spoken.
>
> A claim that English borrows (assimilates) words from other languages
> more easily than other world languages is more legitimate.
Oh, I see what you're saying now :-). I don't write well and never
have.
/BAH
jmfbahciv
/BAH
Andrew Usher
> > > This does have advantages. For one thing, the Engs and the Americans
> > > butcher the English language. Real English has a limited set of phonemes,
> > > but the Engs and the Americans have this nasty habit of using every
> > > phoneme from every language. And they're starting to insist that foreign
> > > pronunciations be used. They're completely ignorant that there often are
> > > more than one dialect in a language; for example, Spanish.
> >
> > Please don't use words you don't understand (such as "phoneme").
>
> English hasn't added a (consonantal) phoneme since the 12th century or
> so, when the distinction between s and z (and the other similar pairs)
> was taken over with borrowings of French words.
False. English added [Z] as in 'measure' in the 17c. , and I don't
believe the distinction between voiced and unvoiced 'th' became
phonemic until the 14c. in the standard dialect. It is also true - as
Marvin said - that many English speakers do pronounce foreign words
with foreign phonemes ex. the umlautted vowels in 'Goethe' and
'Fuehrer' (though Brits already have the first), and consider not
using them improper.
Andrew Usher
jmfbahciv
Frenchmen how to modify and work with a ship of new
software. He was given an hour to present 5 hours worth
of technical information. Every sentence he uttered
had to be translated into French before he could go on
to the next sentence. Having an interruption of a
minute between sentences which have intense technical
information disturbs the flow of knowledge. It also
reduced the allotted time of his talk to 30 minutes.
he did not get to talk about many details that the
audience needed to learn about. He put up with this
nonsense because he assumed there were people in
the audience who didn't understand English. After
the talk, he found out everybody knew English. So the
French government edict, which required the seminar
to be translated in French, prevented our knowledge
getting into the heads of the very people who were
trying to produce things in France. Work prevention
is the goal.
/BAH
Andrew Usher
> In English and other languages a lot of scientific vocabulary is
> drawn from Latin, though somewhat less in German, which has been a pre-
> eminent language of science.
English may be the most Latinate of all the modern languages,
actually.
> I think Peter Daniels is right, you can express the ideas of
> science in any language, though historically a lot of scientific
> vocabulary has Latin/Greek roots, with the exceptions noted.
Well, if you work hard enough. Languages that don't have a history of
intellectual use would be extremely hard to use for science without
borrowing a lot of words and senses.
> > And so, some explanations suggest themselves. The first is that the
> > predominant advocates and defenders of Latin, from the Renaissance to
> > now, are from the humanities; and so once Latin had disappeared from
> > live literary use, their support was no longer important.
>
> I think it's the other way around; people in the humanities are the
> ones who adopted national languages!
For literature, yes. But they have always promoted the teaching of
Latin in schools, and until recently, insisted that all students
should learn this language which they'd probably never need again. I'm
saying that they were not inclined to intervene to support Latin after
it was no longer used for new literature (which happened in the 17c.).
> I'm trying to think of examples of scientific works in Latin.
> Newton and Leibnitz wrote in Latin, of course, but Descartes did his work
> in French, and Galileo in Italian.
They wrote in Latin also, and their vernacular works were also
translated into Latin. Obvious later examples are the mathematicians
Euler and Gauss, and also Linnaeus's taxonomy. Peter Daniels mentioned
a linguistic work from 1837. Almost all important works before 1660
were Latin in any case.
> I think somewhat Swedenborg wrote
> scientific works in Latin, but he was probably the very last one.
I don't think of Swedenborg as a scientist, but yes, you're right.
> > The second
> > is to blame it on the French: they abandoned Latin earlier than anyone
> > else, and are well-known to have an inflated view of the greatness of
> > their own language. But that does not seem to explain how it happened
> > everywhere else: had they wanted to emulate the French, they would
> > have started writing in French, and if they had wanted to oppose them,
> > they should have re-emphasised the role of Latin.
>
> More likely the explanation lies in the history of the development
> of science, and the groups that supported it, such as the British Academy
> of Sciences. It may simply be that the use of Latin was too far gone in
> general by the time experimental science really got going, in the 1700's.
> I don't know enough to comment further.
Do you mean the Royal Society? Yes, they worked in English from the
beginning and the Phil. Trans. was always mostly English. But that
didn't stop Newton from using Latin for his major work, because it
hardly affected the international comprehension of English.
Andrew Usher
Chuck Riggs
<gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
>On Dec 26, 10:04�am, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> wrote:
>> On Dec 26, 8:58�am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>> > On Dec 25, 11:18�pm, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> wrote:
>> > > On Dec 25, 11:11�pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>> > > > On Dec 25, 8:01�pm, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> wrote:
>> > > > > On Dec 25, 1:54�pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>> > > > > > On Dec 25, 11:43�am, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> wrote:
>> > > > > > > why isn't this cross-posted to a medical or biological NG? Latin based
>> > > > > > > coinages are AFAIK more alive in those fields. philosophy tends, AFAIK
>> > > > > > > towards german. particle physics is inovative: quark (a fundamental
>> > > > > > > particle, IIRC from a type of german cheese, but based on a miss-
>>
>> > > > > > Did Gell-Mann ever claim any connection with Ger. Quark??
>>
>> > > > > no, he didn't.
>>
>> > > > Then why did you say he did?
>>
>> > > I said the word was from German, not that Gell-Mann claimed the
>> > > connection.
>>
>> > So now it's your claim that Joyce was writing about three cottage-
>> > cheeses for Muster Mark?
>>
>> I don't have any idea what Joyce had in mind, but I know that quark is
>> a type of cheese in German.-
>
>Everyone knows that. But it has nothing to do with the name of the
>subatomic particle, unless Joyce was referencing it in that passage.
It was the other way around. Quarks were named after one of the many
unusual words in Finnegans Wake.
Ian Dalziel
wrote:
I started to say that - but on reflection I think Peter means "unless
Joyce was referencing the cheese".
--
Ian D
James Hogg
Here's what the coiner himself wrote to the OED:
"Compare the following account given by Gell-Mann in a private letter of
27 June 1978 to the Editor of the Supplement to the O.E.D.: 'I employed
the sound "quork" for several weeks in 1963 before noticing "quark" in
"Finnegans Wake", which I had perused from time to time since it
appeared in 1939... The allusion to three quarks seemed perfect... I
needed an excuse for retaining the pronunciation quork despite the
occurrence of "Mark", "bark", "mark", and so forth in Finnegans Wake. I
found that excuse by supposing that one ingredient of the line "Three
quarks for Muster Mark" was a cry of "Three quarts for Mister..." heard
in H. C. Earwicker's pub.'"
--
James
jmfbahciv
> On Sat, 26 Dec 2009 10:17:37 -0500, jmfbahciv wrote:
>
>> The French make it almost
>> impossible to do useful things in an efficient manner. You are not
>> allowed to create new words until they are approved by some commission
>> years later (can't recall the name).
>
> Academie francaise. Sorry, I can't do the French characters.
That name sounds familiar.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionnaire_de_l%27Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%
> A7aise
>
> This does have advantages.
There are none. Keeping the language "pure" prevents wealth creation,
delays new knowledge dissemination (students cannot learn from the
official text books until the new terms are blessed), and other stuff
if you bother to think about how work gets done.
>For one thing, the Engs and the Americans
> butcher the English language. Real English has a limited set of phonemes,
> but the Engs and the Americans have this nasty habit of using every
> phoneme from every language. And they're starting to insist that foreign
> pronunciations be used. They're completely ignorant that there often are
> more than one dialect in a language; for example, Spanish.
>
> Another benefit is that the Engs (Engs live in Eng-land, right?) and
> Americans use words incorrectly, and the incorrect usage becomes
> "correct" because they're so fond of "descriptive" dictionaries rather
> than proscriptive dictionaries. It's very democratic, the idiots get to
> decide what words mean. It's one big Archie Bunker joke. For example, to
> "protest" means to testify FOR something. In idiot speak, to "protest the
> war" means to speak against the war when the real meaning is to speak FOR
> the war.
>
> Lastly, it is hoped that having a panel such as the French Academy would
> prevent fad gibberish words like "bling-bling" from reaching the
> dictionary.
Whose dictionary? You might try to trace when CPU became an approved
word, if it ever did, in France. I name my product; I also create
new words to describe a lot of the behaviours of my new product.
The product has to run in France. Do the company owners have to wait
until all my new words have their French equivalent or should they
be allowed to get the product running and let the political crap
catch up 5 years later.
> Don't even get me started on how "Ebonics" is being passed
> off as English.
>
> The only real downside to the French Academy is that idiots who don't use
> the language properly are called idiots. Is that so wrong?
>
>
There are serious problems. You should think about them more
carefully.
/BAH
>
Andrew Usher
> I have come into this thread late with a poor browser. Excuse me if I
> ask a stupid question.
It's not stupid. It's actually pertinent to the subject of this thread
- though I still haven't gotten any answer for how Enlightenment ideas
might be related to the decline of Latin.
> When Latin fell from favor for international communication, scholarly or
> other, in what field (if any in particular) did it fail first? Was Latin
> particularly useful in the physical sciences or the philosophical
> discourse when it began its decline?
It all non-scholarly fields I think Latin was dead by 1700. In
philosophy, it wasn't much more alive: I can think of the major
philosophical works of the 18c. written in English, French, or German:
even Leibniz wrote his philosophy originally in French! In history,
probably likewise: Gibbon considered writing his magnum opus in
French, but certainly not in Latin. It is in more technical fields,
mainly, that it remained an alternative for some time. Its
obsolescence does not seem to be because Latin was not understood,
though, which is why I asked the question.
Andrew Usher
Andrew Usher
on the question, these can be found with Google:
The first is this, from Bell's 'Men of Mathematics':
' ... the supple Latin in which many of his greatest works were
written. It is an ever-to-be-regretted calamity that even the example
of Gauss was powerless against the tides of bigoted nationalism which
swept over Europe after the French Revolution and the downfall of
Napoleon. Instead of the easy Latin which sufficed for Euler and
Gauss, and which any student can master in a few weeks [! I'll be
charitable and assume Bell means students that have already been
exposed to classical Latin], scientific workers must now acquire a
reading knowledge of two or three languages in addition to their own.
Gauss resisted as long as he could, but even he had to submit when his
astronomical friends in Germany pressed him to write some of his
astronomical works in German.'.
I think Bell is distorting things at least somewhat when he says that
Gauss really wanted to write in Latin: after 1801 almost all his
personal notes were in German, and many of his Latin works were first
drafted in German.
The second is a letter (in English) written by Gauss's grandson that
mentions the publication of the Werke. He says that they will be
difficult reading, but adds to clarify that it is not because of the
Latin but the mathematics; so I suppose one could still assume in 1866
that Latin was sufficiently understood.
Andrew Usher
T.H. Ray
Yes. Wrong and stupid. Arts and language are progressive,
not the province of some particular class. Since this
ignorant and bigoted nonsense keeps appearing in
sci.math, let's make some small attempt to put it back
on topic:
Mathematics is also a language. Its progress, like
the progress of natural language, depends on the creative
ability to invent terms for new varieties of experience.
Tom
Peter T. Daniels
> On Sun, 27 Dec 2009 13:33:09 +0000, Chuck Riggs <chri...@eircom.net>
I don't see how what I wrote could be interpreted any other way.
Peter T. Daniels
Not in France, not in Israel, not anywhere else that there's an
Academy of Language do "government rules prevent creation of new
words." New words continue to come into languages as they are needed,
whether or not they get into some official wordlist somewhere, and
there's nothing a "government" can do about it.
> > A claim that English borrows (assimilates) words from other languages
> > more easily than other world languages is more legitimate.
>
> Oh, I see what you're saying now :-). I don't write well and never
> have.
>
> /BAH-