Re: Gravity Essay Competition

In sci.physics, Uncle Al
<UncleAl0@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote
on Fri, 25 May 2007 07:41:14 -0700
<4656F58A.CF7B8425@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Matej Pavsic wrote:
[snip]

In the last 15 years all first award winners were affiliated with the
institutions from the English speaking world.
[snip]

Educated technical folk speak English.

Pedant Point: the classical languages for science used to be English,
Latin, German, and French (not necessarily in that ranking). Nowadays,
I suspect English is most often used, and English has the bad habit
of borrowing things from these four languages.

If not, they are isolated from
their profession. Fret not! In about a decade anything American will
be a sour joke. Then you can complain abut speaking and writing
Mandarin Chinese. This is a good time to invest in Babelfish.

Fortunately, SYSTRAN can handle both simplified and
traditional Chinese, though I'm not at all sure regarding
exactly how it represents the results, and given its
performance in other languages (I know a little German and a
tiny smattering of French), it's probably far from perfect.

http://babelfish.altavista.com/

A quick trial on "Happy new year", however, spat out
some kanjii. Presumably someone knowledgable in Chinese
might be able to read it; I can't read it without a lot
of digging around various "Learn Chinese!" web sites.
(I can barely read katakana, and that's Japanese.)


But I think that the problem goes beyond the essay competition and that
it touches more important things. In order to describe new fundamental
concepts so to be understandable and convincing to others, a physicist
has to master the language in which s/he writes. Young Einstein perhaps,
if he had written his paper on special relativity in English, would very
probably not have been able to convince people, just because he could
not have exposed so extremely well his very deep fundamental thoughts in a
foreign language.

Have you ever walked down the halls of academia as the bleeding edge
is discussed by Darkies? The necessary words to not exist in their
native patois. One chortles to contemplate the Mandarin Chinese
symbology for "tetraphenylcyclopentadienone." The Chinese do, in
fact, have a phonetic alphabet. It is used to boostrap the young to
reading the horror in common use, then discredited as effete. One
doubts Sandskrit or Hindi was configured to contain "superconducting
multinuclear Fourier Transform nuclear magnetic reasonance
spectrometer."

Israel has a national institute of scholars to create "compatible"
vocabulary from the torah as new stuff appears. A kid educated in
Israel enters the world to discover he has been liguistically screwed,
telephones to NMRs to Gunn diodes.


Well, John Battiscombe Gunn isn't exactly Chinese, last I looked. :-)
Nor was he Israeli; he was born in Great Britain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunn_diode

(It could be worse, but 'Cyril Hilsum' doesn't translate well to
a transferred electron device somehow. Would you really want to
try to buy a "Hilsumian diode"? ;-) )

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