| Well, I agree with the most part that Doc Chang has said (pls let me call you DC), but I still have to clarify several points. As we know, the dramatic progress which the states made in the 50's or the existence of English as a de facto international language is due to many reasons, among other things, the immigrants from the continental Europe during the world war, the strong financial support, a nice philosophy of doing science, etc. Saying the whole thing is only the consequence of the fact that, a bunch of scientists suddenly decided not to write their papers in German, but English instead, just made me laugh. How could this happen? I mean if each of us thinks just twice. Writing something skillfully doesn't necessarily make you a good scientist, in this sense, it doesn't matter too much, if at all, in which language your publications are written. The other way around, a great scientist, according to my criterion, should be bilingual or multilingual. This is simply the must for communication during collaborations and also represents the fundamentals of science, namely open mind. There is a prominent journal in chemistry called Angewandte Chemie, which you may guess was originally published in German. And yes, their first issue even goes back to the 19th century, however, in the year of 1962, they finally decided to do the publishing in German and English at the same time, which lasts until today. I told you this example just to show how the attitude of Europeans on scientific language has changed in the history. And as far as I know, these days people in continental Europe, which is not English speaking basically, do not feel anything wrong to speak English. On the contary, I think those guys in the states who insisted to use English exclusively were extremely arrogant. Yes, true. The quality of science in China IS increasing, no doubt. But this doesn't mean that it'll last forever or move much even faster if we write everything in Chinese, this doesn't make sense. p.s.: “A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” happens to be an old Chinese saying, you should be proud (or confident, as you put it) of that... Cheers |
Diversity, Consistency, and Efficiency - Part II