Non-English Languages Lack the Words for Talking About Technology

By the early 19th century, just three—French, English, and German—accounted for the bulk of scientists’ communication and published research; by the second half of the 20th century, only English remained dominant as the U.S. strengthened its place in the world, and its influence in the global scientific community has continued to increase ever since.

As a consequence, the scientific vocabularies of many languages have failed to keep pace with new developments and discoveries. In many languages, the words “quark” and “chromosome,” for example, are simply transliterated from English. In a 2007 paper, the University of Melbourne linguist Joe Lo Bianco described the phenomenon of “domain collapse,” or “the progressive deterioration of competence in [a language] in high-level discourses.” In other words, as a language stops adapting to changes in a given field, it can eventually cease to be an effective means of communication in certain contexts altogether.

Notes:

Folksonomies: culture technology

Taxonomies:
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/technology and computing (0.325419)
/technology and computing/programming languages (0.169736)

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Linguistics (0.731256): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Phonology (0.712053): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Dialect (0.661974): dbpedia | freebase
German language (0.653247): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago
19th century (0.650260): dbpedia | freebase | yago
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Programming language (0.612897): dbpedia | freebase

 The Hidden Bias of Science’s Universal Language
Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article:  HUTTNER-KOROS, ADAM (AUG 21, 2015), The Hidden Bias of Science’s Universal Language, The Atlantic, Retrieved on 2015-11-09
  • Source Material [www.theatlantic.com]
  • Folksonomies: technology lexicons