GORDIN - Scientific Babel (2015)

 SCIENTIFIC BABEL

Introduction

• Fazer a tradução visível.
• [ver  I. J. Citr
  oen, “The Myth of the Two Professions: Literary and Non-Literary Translation,” Babel 11 (1965): 181–188]
• [". Was this a vanished race of polyglot naturalists? Of course not. Some of them were more linguistically gifted than others, to be sure, but most of them managed with a dictionary and consultation with those more adept (as I often did). " 10]
• "The scholarship you read is always biased by the linguistic capacities of the scholar." 10
• Critica ao universalismo da linguagem e ao suposto papel da matemática nisso 11-2
• Rise of the french 16
• Papel da trad no debate Priestley-Lavosier 19

The Perfect past that almost was

• Latin era visto como um paraíso perdido ou como uma amarra.
• Em roma grego era uma segunda língua estimada e falada pelas elites e pelos scholars.
• Latim era usada como uma língua de popularização da cc escrita em grego. Os scholars achavam o latim inferior ao grego por falta de vocabulário para descrição da natureza 28-9
• Cicero estimulou o uso de latim para comunicar a filosofia e a ciência traduzindo do grego, e pelo século I AD o latim já se virava bem. 31
• "A language of science needs two features: it must have the requisite flexibility to adapt to changing discoveries and theories; and scientists (or, before that English term was coined in 1833, natural philosophers) have to actually use it" 31
• O Latim deixou de ser falado no Império Romano Oriental, mas não houve engajamento com os textos em grego. No Ocidente perdeu-se o contato com o grego, permanecendo o latim.
• The difficulty of acquiring Greek in Western Europe meant that the scholarship that was encour- 32 chapter one aged by the likes of Charlemagne, who brought Alcuin of York to his court to overhaul education and revive the status of Latin as a clerical and liturgical language, was largely confined to a set of texts either originally written in Latin or translated from the Greek in late antiquity. The canon is small, and bespeaks the limited interest in natural philosophy in the Latin West [..] 31-2
• Greek ceased to be a major language of science not because it ceased to be a language, but because people had stopped doing science in it; Latin became a scientific language through its encounter with Arabic. 33
• A igreja teve um papel importante ao adotar o latim.
• Acompanhada da chegada das tecnicas de manufatura de papel houve a "renascença do século XII" com a tradução dos textos arabes que eram traduções do grego via siriaco ou outras linguas. O Latim se tornou a lingua de ciencia na europa ocidental.
• [...] Latin’s status as a language of science rested on the contrast it made with the use of the vernacular in other contexts. The bilingualism of scholars underscored scholarship as a distinctive activity.37 The very artificiality of using a classical language added to this logic, feeding back into a purist quest for the most pristine Latin style. [...] 8 The more specialized scholarship became, the more unvernacular Latin had to be, [...]. 35
• A iamgem criada do chinês classico fundamentou a ideia de uma lingua universasl na europa.
• No século XVII já se preferia as línguas vernaculares. Latim foi abandonado devido a sua falta de flexibilidade. Por questões dfe financiamento. Queda do poder da irgrja depois da refomra. "a sense of self-conscious modernity"; e falta de educação clássica para todos.
• Cartas de Berman mostram a babel do XVIII. Bergman (esrtudante de Linnaues) buscou construir uma nomenclatura em latim para os elmentos consciente das vantagem de uma lingua morta, pois já havia tentado privadamente em sueco 47.
• A panaceia de vernaculares deu lugar ao triunvirato pelo meio do ´seculo XIX.

The table and the wood

• Distribuição periódica dos elementos descoberta pelo menos seis vezes. Gordin vai usar o standoff the Moyer e Mendeleev como um proxy do embate entre as linguas russa e alema.
• "In order to count as a significant language of science, it was not enough simply to be written in, others had to be persuaded to read it." 54
• Houve um problema de tradução para o alemão que afetou a questão de prioridade entre os dois pela palavra "periódico".57-9 Gerou uma treta com Wurz depois 61-3.
• Moyer reclamou que não era obrigado a ler russo 64
• O inicio da sociedade cientifi9ca da russia ja era consciente do isolamento linguistico e já enviava artigos em alemão e frances e ocasionalmente ingles para serem publicados. Houve um movimento mais nacionalista na quimica mas nao vingou.
• Beilstein tradutor de Mendeleev: 69-70
• Mias para o final do seculo XIX houve um aumento na ciencia russa escrita em russo. Acompanhada de uma reforma na lingua para abarcar a produção do triunvirato.
• It was not until October 1859, in fact, that Heinrich Lenz, dean of the physico-mathematical faculty of St. Petersburg University—and clearly of German ancestry himself—felt emboldened to petition his supervising ministry: “[T]he Faculty finds that from now on, there is decisively no need in particular instruction in the Latin language in the category of the natural sciences.”*17 
• As the sciences were beginning to move toward Russian as a language of communication within Russia, the nature of Russian itself was changing radically. Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century with the writings of the first ethnic Russian member of the Academy of Sciences—poet, chemist, and polymath Mikhail Lomonosov (1711– 1765)—one of the most momentous transformations in the history of Russian took place, gradually reforming not just the vocabulary but even the syntax and word order of Russian to resemble Western European languages, especially French.18 By the early nineteenth century, a modern Russian entirely intelligible to a speaker of today’s language had emerged, and alongside it a scientific style shaped by libraries full of foreign texts.19 But Russian scientists still needed a language to communicate with Western academicians, and Latin was no longer workable. The solution had to be something contemporary, and the obvious choice seemed to be German. 86-7
• "[...] scientists deploy a whole slew of abstract concepts (think of “potential” or “compound”) that need to be carefully distinguished from their everyday meanings. The core reason why scientific languages require so much construction is that modern science focuses upon novelty: new objects in the world, new ideas, new theories" [new species] 81
•  A elite falalva francês, embora o alemão fosse importante na comunicação cientifica. 
• Eram conscientes das autotrads possivelmente ruins 90, inclusive mendeleev.
• Foi necessário construir uma nomenclatura russa para os elementos.

Speaking Utopian

• No começo dfo XX o triunvirato falhava. Várias linguagens construidas foram tentadas, das quais esperanto teve mais sucesso.

The Wizards of Ido

• Dedicado a lingua ido. Offshoot do esperanto que negava o dogmatismo do Fundamento. Tinha pretensões ccs tambpem,

The Linguistic shadow of the Great War

• Durante a guerra havia um preconceito linguistico contra o alemão.
• Wissenschaft não é ciência propriamente dito, refere-se a pesquisa sistematizada.
• O idioma começou a se cristalizar a partir da reforma com lutero. No século XVII havia um movimento vernacularista que preteria o latim. A invenção da prensa de gutenberg no XV mostra a preponderancia do latim na epoca. Também começou o embate entre a lingua falada e a lingua escrita.
•  Houve um grande movimento do 18 de construção da lingua para poder abarcar a cc. Lingua do norte se tornou a lingua do saber. Deu certo, o latim foi cada vez menos impresso 166
• Frances falado pelas elites estatais como lingua diplomatica.
• Alemanha despontou em tecnologia no século XX.
• Briga pela quimica retorna, alemães dizem que é deles 169
• Helmholtz aprendendo linguas 172
• "Even Meillet, who scorned the language so poetically at the opening of this section, concluded that “Not knowing German is almost always to renounce being current in the science and technology of the times.”" 172
• Havia um grande movimento de internacionalização pré-guerra.
• The contrast between the dignified status of the signatories [of the Aufruf (declaração contra mentiras do outro lado da guerra assinada por diversos ccs e artistas)] and their tone of righteous umbrage on the one hand, and the horrific reports of massacres of civilians from the Belgian countryside on the other, combined a violation of international law (the invasion of neutral lands) with a violation of the neutrality of science. 174
• The second scientific sin, however, was clearly German in origin, and it was terrible beyond imagination. [...] chorine gas. 174
• Gerou desconfiança na cc alemã 175
• Tratado de versalhes (que abriu o floodgate diplomatico frances) permitia sanções intelectuais
• The first, and most notorious, was the Boycott.51 In 1919, British, French, and Belgian scientists created a new scientific organization in Brussels, the International Research Council (IRC, to use the English acronym) to replace the International Association of Academies—the institution that had refused to rule on the Delegation’s proposals for an artificial auxiliary language. The IRC served as the umbrella organization for a series of “international unions” replacing prewar international scientific organizations, many of which had been based in Germany. The Executive Committee of the IRC consisted mostly of hardline anti-Germans, especially Emile Picard, Georges Lecointe, Vito Volterra, and the German-born British physicist Sir Arthur Schuster. Only the American representative, George Ellery Hale, was lukewarm. The Central Powers—that is, Germany and Austria, for Austria-Hungary was no more—were excluded from membership until at least 1931 by statute, and the victors stacked the deck against amendments by requiring that even former neutrals could only be included by a three-fourths supermajority.52 Naturally, the official languages of such an organization would be French and English (regardless of Swiss grumbling).53 
• It was a bad time to be a German scientist. Much of the process of actually doing science in this period was conducted at international conferences, and this was the chief target of the Boycott.176
• Houve backlash por parte dos alemães que ressaltvam o internacionalismo da cc. Foram excluidos da IUPAC.
• Consequencias
• The exclusion of German as a language of science in an international scientific body might sound like a minor affront. Who would want to go to those boring meetings anyway? But precisely such standardization bodies, which set the ground rules for scientific governance around the globe, have enormous long-term impacts that amounted to an almost irreversible lock-out of German—albeit with a time delay. There were different ways the official disapproval cascaded down to the mundane decisions everyday scientists made about which journals to submit to, or which languages to speak. As in most cases, the effects were not most strongly seen among the Germans themselves, who continued to use their native language, nor among native Francophones and Anglophones, who used theirs. Rather, individuals who had once used a variety of vehicular languages—the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Portuguese—might now choose differently. The official languages allowed at conferences constrained the options. In 1932, for example, French was permitted as an official language at 351 (98.5%) of the international conferences that year, and English at 298 (83.5%). The Boycott being over, German was officially permitted at 60.5%—nothing to sneeze at, but a far cry from the parity one would have expected in the prewar years.68 Germany also never regained its leading position as a host country of international scientific conferences; from roughly 20% on the eve of the war, this number crashed to about 3% interwar.69 179-80
• também houve menos publicações em alemão.
• Anglofonia:
• [...] first, the visceral reaction there [in the US] against German was more pronounced, more violent, and more prolonged than in the other victorious countries; and second, because the tremendous growth of the American chemical industry during and after the war soon transformed the distant trans-Atlantic outpost into the most productive scientific country in the world. That community was clearly largely Anglophone; the legacy of World War I made it also often non-Germanophone. 180-1
• Alemão era muito popular nos eua antes da guerra. A partir da guerra começou a surgir um sentimento anti linguas estrangeira.
• A esfera d einfluiencia alemã ainda preferia alemão. O boicote foi finalizado antes do previsto em 1926. 

Unspeakable

• German science entered the 1930s triumphant. The Boycott had been lifted in 1926, and Germans now attended and hosted international conferences, bathed in the glow of self-righteousness as victims of an unheard-of transgression against scientific internationalism. German scientists raked in Nobel Prize after Nobel Prize, and foreign students flocked to German universities to study at the feet of the titans of the newly emergent quantum physics, then taking the physical sciences by storm. The slow-acting poison pill of the exclusion of the German language from international organizations, the looming threat of competition from American science, and the teeming youngsters of the United States who would grow up without significant exposure to foreign languages—all of these were invisible threats to the dominance of German as a language of science. German still shared the stage with French and English, but the former was evidently in a process of slow decline, and as for English—well, while it was clear that the Americans had overâ•‚ taken the British as the leaders of Anglophone science and were flooding journals with publications, one could always debate about quality. 187-8
• Hitler contudo, entra no poder em 1933. Ainda em 33 é passada a lei do serviço civil.
• The emigration did not bleed away most of Germany’s talent, but it did inflict a significant threefold harm on German as a scientific language. First, symbolically, foreign scientists began to view the German state with revulsion and expressed reluctance to “collaborate” with the regime in any way. Second, those scientists who left almost all ended up in Anglophone contexts, continuing their high-quality research in a new tongue. The third change was the most immediate and perhaps the one with the longest-lasting consequences: the rupture of the graduatestudent and postdoctoral exchange networks.
• Houve vários impactos cientométricos relacionados a ascensão do nazismo.
• Controle linguistico pelo partido. Lingua tertii imperi. Houve controle do vocabulário.
• "But language composes and thinks not only for me, it also guides my feeling, it directs my entire spiritual nature—the more selfevident it is, the more unconsciously I abandon myself to it. And if formulated language is now formed out of poisonous elements or is made into the bearer of poisons? Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are absorbed unwittingly, they seem to have no effect, and after a certain time the effect of the poison is just there. If for a long enough time a person says for “heroic” and “brave” the word “fanatical,” he actually finally believes that a fanatic is a brave hero, and that without fanaticism one cannot be a hero.*27" 197-8
• Fisica ariana
• Among the luminaries of the German physics community in the interwar years were two “old fighters,” Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, both Nobel Laureates (the former for his experimental measurements of the photoelectric effect, the latter for his discovery of the splitting of atomic spectral lines in an electric field). As Hitler solidified his hold on power, Lenard and Stark saw an opportunity to bring Nazi ideology into the heart of physics. They petitioned the Education Ministry to replace the highly mathematical, theoretical approach to elite physics dominant in what they saw as “Jewish” science with a more “Deutsch” physics based on experiment and concrete intuition. At the core of Aryan Physics resided a hostility to quantum theory and relativity, both ably represented by its arch-theorist, renowned pacifist and Zionist celebrity Albert Einstein. Rather than lament the sundered ties of international collaboration, Stark virtually exulted in the autarky of science in the Third Reich [...]. 
• The year 1934 was a good one for Aryan Physics, as Bernhard Rust, the education minister, wrested the Department of Culture from its former home in the Reich Interior Ministry, dismissing Friedrich Schmidt-Ott from his decade-long control of the invaluable Notgemeinschaft that had sustained German science during the Boycott. Rust replaced him with Stark.31 From there, however, Aryan Physics went downhill, as Rust resented interference in his bailiwick and other powerful factions in the Nazi regime became persuaded that the advance of militarily valuable research required both quantum and relativity theories—although they should be taught, naturally, without reference to Einstein. The established physics journals continued for the most part uninflected by Lenard and Stark’s program; ideological articles were relegated to a new journal, Zeitschrift für die gesamte Naturwissenschaft.32 Aryan Physics crumbled without top-down support, but not without causing a lot of damage. 198-200
• Pouco se falava de linguagem, o alemão era obvio para eles: "Explicit commentary about scientific languages appears only when a language seems to be threatened or when the choice of language is not obvious." 200.
• Emigrantes sofreram com a perda da lingua mae.
• Problemas com lignuas de einstein e outros ccs. 206-10
• Um boicote já era pensado em 1939 mas ele nunca ocorreu de fato. O cisma entre as comunidades linguisticas cientificas no entando se intensificou.

The Dostoevsky Machine

• Demonstração do 701 traduzindo russo da ibm em 1954. Esperavase que em 57 não haveria mais problema de linguagem. Dostert linguista interacvional que havia organizado a primeira interpretação simultanea em nuremberg
• Após a decade de 50 o russo começou a superar o alemão em publicações técnicas.
• Problemas das linguas dos cientistas. 217-8
• Retornam as linguas construidas. Interlingua proximada cc.
• Na URSS havia uma cultura de poliglotia.
• Lysenko
• Beginning in the 1930s, a young agronomist named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko challenged the fast-consolidating scientific consensus that heredity was transmitted by genes that remained essentially unaffected by an organism’s surrounding environment, proffering instead a modification of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s early nineteenth-century theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. According to Lysenko’s doctrine of “Michurinism”—named after Ivan Michurin, a quirky Russian plant breeder—heredity could be manipulated through a series of practices called “vernalization” in order to generate desired qualities (such as greater resistance to cold or higher yields) that would be passed on to future generations. Lysenko effectively packaged his attacks on geneticists in the discourse of Stalinist ideology. The conflict went into abeyance during the war, but erupted with renewed vigor immediately afterward, resulting in an August 1948 declaration by Lysenko that the Central Committee of the Party—that 224 chapter eight is, Stalin—had approved his theory and condemned the geneticists. Genetics remained an officially forbidden doctrine in the Soviet Union until Lysenko’s fall from power in 1965.38 223-4
• Na decade de 1950 russo ficou importante a ponto de ser critério em pós grad.
• Conta a historia do desenvolvimento da MT.

All the Russian that is fit to print

• Georgetown motivou grupos de pesquisa em MT russos.
• In the latter half of the decade, the language crisis began to be perceived as a national problem that was amenable to solution by the state. This was less surprising in the Soviet Union, where most scientific problems were viewed this way, but in the United States it represented something of a sea change that would permanently alter the terrain of debate. 244
• MT pode estar ligada com a volta do estruturalismo.
• VINITI
• By the late 1970s, Referativnyi Zhurnal lost its edge while VINITI became increasingly strapped for resources and personnel, stabilizing its coverage at a whopping 1.3 million abstracts a year while the scientific literature mushroomed ever larger.34 But in the 1950s and into the 1960s, VINITI was the envy of American science planners, ostensibly demonstrating why the Soviet Union had been able to assume the lead in the space race, as well as eclipsing the United States in the training of scientists and engineers. The tremendous American investment in machine translation has to be understood against the backdrop of the total picture of Soviet science-information efforts as obsessively tracked by Western observers 251
• Coleman e sua empresa de tradução tiveram impacto na economia da profissão quando ele jogou o salário lá pra baixo. Montou uma grande operação privada de tradução do russo.
• Várias empresas começaram a fazer cover to cover:
• Consider what was happening here: each month a hefty tome would arrive at an office in the United States, be ripped apart, distributed, translated, edited, stitched back together, and printed, all within six months—and this was done for dozens of journals, every month, for decades. It was the largest scientific translation project in the history of the world. 257-8
• Haviam vários problemas bibliográficos, politicos e economicos circulando, contudo.
• MT não atendeu aos sonhos de progresso e menos de uma decada depois havia sido quase totalmente abandonada enquanto o cover to cover foi amplamente financiado pela NSF.
• ". If you were a scientist in Pakistan, or Italy, or Brazil, you had to follow both American and Soviet science. Instead of learning two languages, the Americans had made it possible to get by entirely on English, and so it became more and more prevalent as the default language of science" 265

The Fe Curtain

• Situação da alemanha dividida. Ciencia impossível no pós guerra.
• "The major mechanism of linguistic transformation throughout this book has been education" 271
• Reestruturação nas duas alemanhas.
• ” Told through the eyes of scientists who (for the most part) sincerely believed that they worked above ideology and outside of narrow geopolitical interests, the narrative differs from conventional stories of the Cold War. There aren’t many spies and there is surprisingly little overt grandstanding, but nonetheless the choices made by Otto Hahn with Beilstein, the East German academy with the denazification of Pflücke, the universities East and West as they struggled to staff their courses and simultaneously adapt to a new, post–Third Reich Germany (and, eventually, Germanies), relate a story of Europe for the modern age. 290
• A lingua:
• he fuzzy national status of German—in the postwar period, it was an official language in six countries and enjoyed subordinate (minority or regional) status in Belgium, Italy, and Namibia besides—was to some extent an advantage. German was a capitalist language, as represented by the Federal Republic. It was a socialist language, as evidenced by the Democratic Republic. It was politically neutral, thanks to Switzerland. It enjoyed, therefore, a marked capacity to serve as a passport between different worlds, facilitating a resurgence of the language as a vehicle for international trade.96 For many, however, hopes for the rehabilitation of the language to its former international dominance rested with science, for this was an area (unlike politics or economics) where German dominance was not resented in the contemporary world, and in which the achievements of the past retained value. The rare optimistic article proclaiming a renaissance in German to lie right around the corner would always cite science—the Max Planck Society, the excellent universities, the prestigious journals and publishers—as the vehicle for future growth.97 More realistic sociolinguists, however, recognized that the state of German in the sciences was locked into a zero-sum relationship with English. As Ulrich Ammon, the foremost scholar of the present-day status of German as a scientific language, noted in 1990: “the ground lost by German has been gained virtually exclusively by English.”98 291

Anglophonia

• Latim no código de nomenclatura botanico
• Descriptions in Latin became a requirement in 1906, in response to a request by Spanish botanists to allow their language as legitimate for botanical diagnoses alongside French, English, German, and Italian. The reaction was predictable: to avoid an incipient Babel of too many languages, the international organization insisted upon the language of the Romans, perceived as neutral. The custom was reaffirmed in Article 37 of the International Code, published in 1961. And now, in 2012, Latin was perceived as unwieldy and backward, and the new language of neutrality was one of the very tongues the Spanish delegates had protested: English.2 293
• Avanço do inglês por não nativos.
• Inglês bastante inexpressivo até o inicio do XVIII
• Ogden e Richards propõe o basic english
• Ingles tem um vocabulário cientific gicgante. 299
• A historia até aqui
• First, the triumvirate had to be displaced before English could break away from French and German. The initial destabilizing impulse came with the rise of nationalist ambitions from large scientific cohorts such as the Russophone one, which challenged the tight strictures around three dominant languages, but this was overshadowed by the refusal of the largest and richest Anglophone population, that in the United States of America, to continue learning foreign languages. These factors were supplemented by geopolitical developments by which American science was lifted with American power, and the English language alongside both. 
• nglish itself was not responsible—that is, English does not possess specific qualities that make it particularly well suited for scientific research. Most linguists today would shudder at the notion that any language is intrinsically suited for, say, chemistry, not least because languages themselves are subject to constant modifications and interactions. Yet repeatedly one finds claims that this must be what lies behind English’s victory [...]
• More powerful than any intrinsic linguistic advantage to English was a definite political backlash against German in the wake of National Socialist brutality. The reaction against German in the United States happened earlier, with the nihilistic enthusiasm of anti-Teutonic sentiment uncorked by the Great War; to a lesser degree, other nations dismantled their German educational structures in the late 1940s. 306
• One of the most curious features of the rise of English is the fact that political resistance from rapidly decolonizing nations did not provide effective resistence either in diplomacy or in scholarship. Decolonization did little to staunch the spread of Anglophonia, often because of the unavoidable necessity of some vehicular or auxiliary language.
• The crucial shift was the transition from a triumvirate that valued, at least in a limited way, the expression of identity within science, to an overwhelming emphasis on communication and thus a single vehicular language. The very same arguments that had been pooh-poohed when voiced by Esperantists and Idists at the dawn of the twentieth century came to be unquestioned axioms by century’s end. Most sociologists and applied linguists who have examined the hegemony of scientific English have pointed to English’s ubiquity as the almost accidental outcome of computerized reference tools and the inexorable and omnipresent gravitational pull generated by the wealth and scientific prominence of the United States.67 307
• Inglês é neutro e não regulado. Beneficiado por não nativos 309-10 Porém:
• Yet evidence that English is not neutral is remarkably easy to find. The most obvious asymmetry is that a certain segment of the community learns the language effortlessly as children; the rest—the majority—struggle through years of education. Their goal is not just to be able to muddle through an English article, dictionary in hand, to extract a general sense, but to acquit themselves orally under the intense pressure of hostile interrogation at a conference. Scientists are typically not gentle in their probing of their colleagues, and a failure of fluency can be a fatal handicap for one’s theories, or one’s career. 310-1
• Hegemonia da lingua permite o corte da tradução., o custo é que todos os não nativos aprendam ingles.
• Monolinguismo danifica a ciência ou o inglês?

Babel Beyond

• Comentário sobre a ideia que a cc não depende de linguas pois é ela mesma um lingua.