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How English Beat German As the Language of Science
HughPickens.com writes German was the dominant scientific language in 1900. Today if a scientist is going to coin a new term, it's most likely in English. And if they are going to publish a new discovery, it is most definitely in English. Look no further than the Nobel Prize awarded for physiology and medicine to Norwegian couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser. Their research was written and published in English. How did English come to dominate German in the realm of science? BBC reports that the major shock to the system was World War One, which had two major impacts. According to Gordin, after World War One, Belgian, French and British scientists organized a boycott of scientists from Germany and Austria. They were blocked from conferences and weren't able to publish in Western European journals. "Increasingly, you have two scientific communities, one German, which functions in the defeated [Central Powers] of Germany and Austria, and another that functions in Western Europe, which is mostly English and French," says Gordin.
The second effect of World War One took place in the US. Starting in 1917 when the US entered the war, there was a wave of anti-German hysteria that swept the country. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota there were many, many German speakers. World War One changed all that. "German is criminalized in 23 states. You're not allowed to speak it in public, you're not allowed to use it in the radio, you're not allowed to teach it to a child under the age of 10," says Gordin. The Supreme Court overturned those anti-German laws in 1923, but for years they were the law of the land. What that effectively did, according to Gordin, was decimate foreign language learning in the US resulting in a generation of future scientists who came of age with limited exposure to foreign languages. That was also the moment, according to Gordin, when the American scientific establishment started to take over dominance in the world. "The story of the 20th Century is not so much the rise of English as the serial collapse of German as the up-and-coming language of scientific communication," concludes Gordin.
The second effect of World War One took place in the US. Starting in 1917 when the US entered the war, there was a wave of anti-German hysteria that swept the country. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota there were many, many German speakers. World War One changed all that. "German is criminalized in 23 states. You're not allowed to speak it in public, you're not allowed to use it in the radio, you're not allowed to teach it to a child under the age of 10," says Gordin. The Supreme Court overturned those anti-German laws in 1923, but for years they were the law of the land. What that effectively did, according to Gordin, was decimate foreign language learning in the US resulting in a generation of future scientists who came of age with limited exposure to foreign languages. That was also the moment, according to Gordin, when the American scientific establishment started to take over dominance in the world. "The story of the 20th Century is not so much the rise of English as the serial collapse of German as the up-and-coming language of scientific communication," concludes Gordin.
German was *illegal*?? WF? All the current "this politician has totally undermined the constitution in ways never seem before" crap must come from people with short memories.
I read Turing's Cathedral recently that discussed this exact topic (with relation to math). German was still very strong after WW1 (Godel, Von Neumann, Hilbert, Einstein, Schrödinger and even more if you include groups like Hungary and Poland who were strong in math but discussed it in German, which is where we got Ulam and Teller). Unfortunately for the Germans, a lot of those mathematicians were Jewish, and they left when they saw war coming. Most of Ulam's family that didn't leave were killed in the Holocaust.
In the US, some foresighted individuals (like Veblen, Aydeloytte and Flexner at Princeton's Advanced Institute especially) made a huge effort to help the German scientists escape. So many top scientists did leave that the entire center of science moved from the German world to America.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Not really von Braun did more as political figure than as an engineer. The Thor, Atlas, and Titan had very little input from von Braun and Polaris and Minuteman had zero.
I doubt that religion had much to do with it. I am sure avoiding being slaves in Russia had a lot more to do with it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
My Herrschaft, German really is such a Biedermeier language and and doesn't fit with the current Zeitgeist. It has a gestalt that is more suited for 19th century expression. After the English-language Blitzkrieg that has taken over most pop culture, any german-language expression is seen as just a lot of flak from a karabiner. I guess we'll have to replace classical german terms such as Herz, Eigen-vector, E-Modul, with a more english ideal; cycles-per-second (so much for brevity). But German is such a beautiful language an sich. I really had my Aha-Erlebnis when I realised that german expressions were no longer associated with übermenschen traveling in U-Boots or flying in Luftwaffe planes. Now the whole world can enjoy rooting for German Wunderkinder on the national team, and at home recreate the best parts playing foosball. Maybe the French feel a bit of Schadenfreude at seeing the significant influence of german Gedanken in the english language. Maybe someday they'll be a putsch and French will take over, but for now, I'm counting on a german-language encore.
I would say that melting pot works better than multiculturalism, and it also happens at the genetic level. Most Americans are mutts, which isn't as common elsewhere AFAIK.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
It means that Germans are able to read German stuff AND English stuff while many scientists from the US are just able to read English things.
By the way, learning a second language as early and thoroughly as possible does something to you. It breaks the unconscious 1:1 connection between concepts and words and makes you understand that even the best language is just a poor crutch. There have been countless studies about that. It even helps a lot with not reacting by instinct to things you hear and read because you have learned to differentiate between words and meanings and helps you to grow a kind of conscious processing layer between them. I've learned to never trust the words of someone who knows only one language. Chances are that most of what he treats as thoughts are just unconscious reactions. Things like knowing that the word "freedom" has the same roots as the German "Frieden" ("peace" as opposed to "war") actually helps you with understanding the world instead of just parroting noises.
Not so long ago you would never have been considered educated if you couldn't read and write at least two, maybe three or four languages. And I think there's more to that than just quantity. It's a bit like being able to see with two eyes instead of one, you gain the insight that there's actual a room in front of you and not just a picture. It adds a quality that is very hard to acquire when words, ideas and concepts are all the same to you in a totally unconscious way that you soaked up mostly in childhood (basically very much like an animal).
So: I think that learning a second language may easily be the most important thing you can learn in the long run.
I always thought this rule was invented to make it easier for typesetters to distinguish the end of a sentence from abbreviations. Were the two spaces ever actually typeset?
No, not quite.
Early typesetting practices up to the late 1600s or so varied considerably according to local style. By the early 1700s, the standard practice emerged that larger spaces were placed after punctuation by typesetters to mark the ends of important parts of a sentence (which would allow readers to parse the meaning easier). The standard ultimately adopted in much of Europe was putting an M-quad (a square spacer the size of an 'M' in the font) after a period, an N-quad (the size of 'N', about half an M-quad) after lesser punctuation like commas, and a normal spacer (now called a "thick space") after words, which traditionally was about 1/3 of an em.
Note that these were the way a typesetter would begin to space a line, but most typeset matter was justified, which means various spaces in the lines had to be modified and squeezed or stretched, which might in some cases involve adding extra spacers in places. (The rules for which spaces to add width to were often quite complex, for those typesetters who wanted to obtain an optimal result.)
When typewriters first came into use in the late 1800s, people tried to imitate proper typesetting as best as they could by using 2 or 3 spaces after periods, and sometimes 2 spaces after other punctuation. Ultimately, the standard typesetting rule of 2 spaces after a period came about as an approximation to proper typeset text in the late 1800s.
In the period of roughly the 1920s to 1960s, a little war among publishers to decrease publication costs in books led to poorer cheap materials being used, as well as anything to minimize costs, so interword spaces got squeezed to 1/4-em in many houses, margins got smaller, line spacing decreased, etc. Obviously the large sentence spaces now looked out of place, so they were also reduced gradually to an N-quad and then just a standard interword space. (This was previously known as "French spacing" -- not as anything to do with the Germans, as asserted by the GP. It was practiced in the 19th century in a small number of French publishing houses.)
Meanwhile, typists were (and are) some of the few to attempt to retain the old larger sentence spaces that imitated the way things had been done in typesetting in the 18th and 19th centuries.