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    Interlingua in Chemical Writing

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    Alexander Gode Journal of Chemical Education Sep 1954

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    Interlingua in Chemical Writing

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    maeslor
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    Alexander Gode Journal of Chemical Education Sep 1954

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    Alexander Gode Journal of Chemical Education Sep 1954

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    Interlingua in Chemical Writing

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    maeslor
    Alexander Gode Journal of Chemical Education Sep 1954

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    12 JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION e INTERLINGUA IN CHEMICAL WRITING’ Tes the purpuse of this paper to acquaint my audience sath tbe general pelglples of Interlingue In vo far ag they ean ave to justify the claim that this nw inter national language is destined to become part and pare! af the routine equipment wo Uz to forestall te hans- petng effecta of language barrio on the fee interna nal flow of information in the fields of seaence and technology in general, and of chemistey in particular Troaliae thot ecmo of my ideas on the aubjeet are not Altogether conventional, but T invite you to tet thelr ‘ality hy challenging them, "To begin with I ehould lik to erphasae that, ag we conocrn ourelees with the problems resulting. rom the existence of « multiplet of languages, we should not allow ourelves tobe tnlaed. Into. elighting the pusitve and desiable aspets of the aftermath of Babel, I'am not just worried about the Tivelihood af translator, or about tho fact thut in a golden ago reestablishing the monoglottiam ot the days belore the confusion of tongues there, woul be cll for makers and propagators of international auxiliary languages. The fact is that a single language for all mankind would imp the existence of «single mankind —eulturally homogenized—and I cannot help feeling that one of the basie tenets of our faith in life isthe eonvition that life is rich and worth Living just bee caue its multiple; bene there are, as it were, may mani, THovoHT FORMS ‘The true delights of the study of foreign languages: re not C0 bo identified with the seere-sviety sort of pleaattes enjoyed by little boys inthe practice of rome Ter varsn! of pis latin, from the comprebeuson of hall adults and unvated agpinnta ure excluded * Prosonted before the Division of Chemical Literature at the 126th Mesting of the American Chemnial Society, New York, September, 196 ALEXANDER GODE Science Service, Division of Interlingua, New York,N. ¥. A foreign language changes not merely the forms of words; it changes the forms of thoughts. T must not pursue this introductory Tine of reasoning, too far, but I may be permitted to clarify my point by one or two very obvious examples. A German, for instanee, docs not say, “T went to see a movie.” He “Tam for-me a movie at-look gone.” He takes the idea of “going” in two parts (although he too conceives of it as a single notion) and uses the two parts to bogin and close his statement. He similarly attaches to the idea of “looking” a reference to himself as the interested party and thus obtains again two parts which he ean place before and alter the notion “movie.” He seems to be interested in stating the largest possible number of notions in two prongs which hold betwe them something else, quite in contrast to the speak of English who states one notion after another in what sscems to him the logical continuity of beads on a string, Now it seems to me that: the German prong system and the English bead system are not simply two devices achieving the same result. The two systems reflect Aifferences of reasoning; they correspond to different forms of thought. One sonses the signifieance of all this when one reads a German book and finds that the prongs embrace not only individual phrases and sentences but paragraphs, chapters, and even the work asa whole. To put it in a somewhat exaggerated form ‘at the risk of making caricature of it: One sometimes has the impression that the first sentence of a German book makes sense only when one can take it in eos junction with the last, letting the two keep everything else in balanee in between. One notices a similar thing in the famous German adjectival clusters. When we say that, sists of two isotopes of atomic weights mixed as to give a mean value of 35.46,” a German might well feel that this conveys the completely erro- ‘ous idea of a situation involving three steps: You ‘MARCH, 1935 first have two isotopes; secondly, these get equipped h the atomie weights’35 and 37; and thirdly, you see to it that they are mixed in such a way as to yield a mean atomic-weight value of 35.46. If I may once again indulge my fondness for slight exaggerations, the German might well insist that the isotopes have their atomic weights and appear in a certain mixture before we start describing them, and so he might say. that “chlorine consists of two by the atomic weights 36 and 37 distinguished and to a mean value of 35.46 mixed isotopes.” Please note that my examples were chosen from two very closely related languages. T leave it to your im- agination what would have happened if my ignorance hhad not prevented me from juxtaposing in a similar way, let us 8 ican Tndian and an African Bantu language imply Chinese and Trish Once we appreciate that a switch from one language to another implies a switch from one system of thought forms to another, we are confronted with two possible avenues of argumentation. ‘The one leads us back to where we started: ‘The multiplicity of languages reflects a multiplicity of types and variants of culture associated with a multiplicity of types and variants of thought forms which lend man’s histories their en- chantingly kaleidoscopic versatility. Let us abandon this line, for the time being, to the general linguist who, when concemed with these matters, prefers to call himself a metalinguist mie of reasoning open to us at this point. is still, in this age, fraught with questions whieh five it a dangerously speculative air, We note that various cultures in their maturity use various ways to exploit, in practical terms, the vield of their thought. Ii, now, the forms such thought assumes are related to language forms in so intimate a way that it tums out to be almost indifferent. whether we talk about thought forms or language forms, then it should be possible to state that in all the specific practical achieve ments of a civilization the language of that civilization isa conditio sine qua non, No one will be surprised if T state that Shakespeare, ithe had been bom a Choetaw, would not have produced ‘what amounts to a Choctaw translation of “The Works ‘of Shakespeare” as we know them. No one will con- tradict me if I insist that Dante had to be an Italian in order to write “The Divine Comedy.” But what T mean to say goes a little further. If Lavoisier or Galileo or Helmholtz or Newton had been raised with Chinese us their mother tongue, they would not and ‘even evuld not have done whatever itis they did. T chose Chinese advisedly as the language of compari- son, for I want it to be quite clear that I am not con- cerned with “high” and “low” levels of culture or civilization. Such distinetions may exist; it may even be conceivable that they are reflected in language. But at prosent I merely wish to assert that if Lavoisier, Galileo, Helmholtz, and Newton had spoken th language of a comparably mature yet different civ lization, their thought would have yielded different 133 fruit. A. tangible illustration of this point—and one not working with if's and suppositions—is the history ‘of gunpowder which seems to have been found indepen- dently in the Westem world and in China. In. the West one might trace a gapless continuity from these carly beginnings of explosive tinkering to the hydrogen bomb. In China different thought: forms led from fairly comparable beginnings to impressive pyrotechni- cal developments, Ttisa simple historical fact that all the bases of what ‘we mean in this twentieth century by the terms science and technology are of occidental origin. T have sug~ gested fairly boldly that this is so in consequence of language-rooted thought forms. I have admitted that such a relation between language and scientific and technologieal thinking is as yet hypothetical and speculative, But this ean hardly weaken my argu- ment, for if some day the existence of such a relation ean be traced in causal terms, we shall merely have found the explanation of the long established, clear-cut fact that the language and the underlying hierarchy of concepts in modern science and technology are oc dental and specifically West Furopean—of course in sense in which the Americas are at present the stronghold of Western Europe. RELATIVE IMPORTANCE Now this question of language or languages in science needs to be looked at from a somewhat different and more pragmatic point of view. For brevity’s sake T may hero rofer to an excellent article which Dr. J. E. Holmstrom of the Department of Natural Sciences of UNESCO published under the title of “The language problem of science,” in the May, 1954, issue of Research. Holmstrom estimates that “at least one million scie tifle articles, reports, patents, and books are added to the world’s libraries every year, but that over 50 per cent of these are written in languages which more than half the world’s scientists cannot read.” If ive are interested in the importance of a particular language for science communication we cannot, of course, be impressed with the number of native speakers it ean'boast. Instead we must try to determine the number of scientists who ean read it, regardless of whether it is their native tongue or was acquired by them later in life, Such a figure may then be said to represent. one dimension of the importance of a particular language in science communication. ‘The other would be the bulk of seientifi literature published init. Now it is, of course, most difficult if not altogether impossible to obtain reliable information on both the factors mentioned. Holmstrom has devised a most ingenious graph in which he ean show, with fair reli- ability at least, the relative magnitudes of the product of “number of scientists knowing a certain language” times “bulk of scientific literature published in. it.” On the basis of the Holmstrom graph one may state with some objective assurance what a subjective guess ‘would likewise have indicated. English is by far the 194 most important language in science communication. German and French are next in line, Russian Ings much behind either, and Spanish and Japanese each equal but a fraction of Russian, German, French, Russian, Spanish, and Japanese taken together do not ‘come near the range covered by English alone. Following Holmstrom’s method ono might try to establish similar seales for the importance of various languages for communication in the individual sciences. ‘One may assume that in the ease of chemistry, for in- stance, the general graph would be repeated ‘without striking changes. In medicine there might be more ‘of a change, But on the whole the Holmstrom graph reflects the situation in. seienee generally, as also in each Sndividual eiene, wth ox much precision o8 the avall- able data allow. INTERNATIONALISM IN LANGUAGE In sum, human intercommunieation in general ‘ust cope With the problems resulting from mankind's thousand and one autonomous languages. And human intercommunication in the sciences still has to reckon with the problems resulting from the use ofa half-

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