| Wow. Doc, this is, like, the most brilliant post I think I've ever read in the history of blogging. You should be a national science policy advisor or something! I used to be on track to becoming a physicist (more money in finance :), we actually did go and read a bunch of the 'classical' papers in physics- every single one of them in German. The big Nobel physicists, Lorentz, Planck, Pauli, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Born, all of their landmark papers were in German and so we learned German. So me, I always wondered, how did the main scientific language change? That's interesting history, dude, I like the way you lay out the factors that make a scientific language popular and how the transition was made. It's wild too, back when i was sweatin' my own studies in physics (it ain't easy, i tell you that much), my professor said to me that Einstein in particular, he was just TERRIBLE at foreign languages, he was so bad that, if Einstein had had to write in English, he would have never gone into science and picked another field. Einstein would have probably become an engineer or somethin', working for a German car company! My prof said Heisenberg and Born were also terrible at foreign languages, so they too would have just stayed out of science. Even if they *had* gone into science, they'd've had to spend years improving their English skills to write real sweet-sounding English rather than doing science, so they would have never accomplished their brilliant work cuz they would've lost so many years from their science careers. Fortunately they all felt confident enough to write in their native German, so the physics community got to see their genius at work. That makes me wonder, how many potential Einsteins, Heisenbergs and Borns do we have in China who could be publishing brilliant work now in their native Chinese, but are instead spending like 9 or 10 years having to become experts in English writing skills to write up papers in English which is such a ridiculously different language than Chinese? And yeah, i wonder too, how many brilliant young scientists is China losing permanently to the West if they're made to feel their native Chinese is useless as an academic language? Brain drain hurts, man. Now, for a small country like Hungary or Finland, or Azerbaijan or something, where they use a language with less than 20 million worldwide speakers or something, then yeah, it makes sense for them to write their papers in English or German, or French or somethin' else, since not too many people would read their papers otherwise. But China? You all have like 1.3 or 1.4 billion people in your country alone, plus like another 200 million or somethin' Chinese scattered in other places. Plus, you all have the world's smartest people, i heard China recently won #1 spot in some global math, science and invention competition (Germany was #2, so China beat the world's best!). You all also have some fine productive science labs, that's one reason I'm goin' to China next year! So you all in China, you have the power to write in Chinese and have hundreds of millions of smart people able to read and comment on your work, plus do good science too that changes the world. You all would be makin' a big mistake to slow yourselves up and require to write papers mainly in English-- China, you all have what, a 3,000 year history, smart people, good science, biggest population in the world, strong economy and industry, you all are gonna be the best in the world soon, you just gotta have confidence, write in Chinese and you'll speed your work up. I'm not sayin' just ditch other languages, it's also good to write some papers in French, German or English or Spanish too, but most of your work should be in Chinese. I promise, the rest of us will learn to read and write Chinese if you publish strong work in it! One more thing, the Doc's so right man, when i was doing my phsyics study, we had a Korean postdoc there, he said the best thing for Koreans would be to be able to write in Chinese. He said he was so frustrated about havin' to write in English cuz he spent like 6 years or so, in US and Australia just learnin' English, how to write it better. He took English for like 10 years in Korea but he said it was useless, he had to spend like 6 more years just learnin' how to write papers. He said if he could write in Korean, he could've tripled the number of papers he wrote, he could've won twice as many grants, started his career earlier, started his family earlier, earned twice as much money. He was sayin' you all, in Korea, everybody would have a national celebration if Chinese became a big scientific language, they all learn the characters and they would gain a whole lot. So in China, you all already have hundreds of millions more non-Chinese people all gettin' ready to write in Chinese if you create good Chinese journals. My family's Filipino (a shout out to any of my fellow Pinoy homies out there!), we knew Tagalog and some Spanish, but an old buddy of mine from Manila, he says there's lots of Filipinos in the universities who'd like to write in Chinese too, there are so many Filipinos now in China and Taiwan, they know Chinese, plus all the Chinese people in the Philippines. This despite us once bein' a US colony, we still have people leanin' to Chinese. Japan too, man, the younger people in Japan think Chinese culture's cool, plus they learn the characters even if not used the same way-- i went to Yokohama and they used to all learn English, now they're all takin' Chinese classes, and yeah, it's much easier for Japanese to write in Chinese journals too. So that's all i'm gonna say here for now. But Jian Shuo, your country China man, you all are like the heroes to Asian people everywhere now, you are our representative and the one way that Asian people can again be important in the world and respectable as much as the West. Asian people, we used to be wealthiest and most respected in the world, but people in the US, man they don't know that history at all, they just think West is superior and Asians and Asian languages are all inferior. You in China becomin' strong and productive again, you're leadin' the way, makin' Asia a leader again, just be confident and make Chinese a prestige language, write your important work in it and the rest of us will be cheerin' you on. |
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