By Michael D. Gordin
So how did we get from there to right here? How did French, German, Latin, Russian, or even Esperanto cave in to English? And what do we reconstruct of the event of doing technology within the polyglot earlier? With Scientific Babel, Michael D. Gordin resurrects that misplaced global, partially via an creative mechanism: the pages of his hugely readable narrative account teem with footnotesnot providing history info, yet proposing quoted fabric in its unique language. the result's gorgeous: as we examine the increase and fall of languages, pushed by means of politics, conflict, economics, and associations, we really see it take place within the ever-changing net of multilingual examples. The background of technological know-how, and of English as its dominant language, involves existence, and brings with it a brand new realizing not just of the frictions generated by means of a systematic neighborhood that spoke in lots of usually jointly unintelligible voices, but additionally of the probabilities of the polyglot, and the losses that the dominance of English entails.
Few historians of technology write in addition to Gordin, and Scientific Babel finds his marvelous command of the literature, language, and highbrow essence of technological know-how previous and current. No reader who takes this linguistic trip with him might be disappointed.
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Additional info for Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English
Example text
Wilkins assigned letters to concepts, building up a quasi-Â�mathematical representation that would encode the map of the universe. You can see the difficulty right away: do we class peanuts with peas or nuts? On the one hand, they are legumes, on the other, they are, well, nutty. If we do not understand the universal map of nature—Â�or, worse, if there simply is no single map—Â�then the project cannot work, however noble its inspiration. 54 That’s an interesting fact: Wilkins’s manifesto to repair world knowledge by embedding it in an analytical linguistic frame was composed in a vernacular that was generally understood only in one North Sea archipelago.
And so this book begins where they thought it should: with the dream of universal Latin. * Luc r et i u s1 All languages are, in an important sense, imagined. This might sound absurd: you use language every day; I am using it right now to put these words in sequence in order to convey meaning. What’s imaginary about that? ” The things that we refer to as languages—Â�Swahili, Mongolian, Thai, English—Â�are not objects sitting out there in the world, like a peculiar rock or a specific yellow clapboard house.
The major contrast is also highly significant: the Chinese language belonged to the Chinese, the residents of this immensely powerful Empire around whose periphery the other Asians lived. 46 The European literati who returned from visits to China saw the universality of the script but missed out on its freighted quality. 47 After a good two centuries of esteem and adoration, the humanistic bloom was off the Latin rose, and influential natural philosophers in several different lands began to think of a replacement, unencumbered by historical oddities and adapted to the innovations of the transformation of science underway in the seventeenth century.