Scientific Babel

Scientists now publish and talk almost entirely in English, yet this was never a foregone conclusion, and the shift happened fairly recently. Michael D. Gordin traces how a tangle of politics, funding, individual temperaments and clashes between nations pushed science toward one language. The account runs from the medieval period to the present day. It follows the decline of Latin as the common tongue of learned Europe and shows how a number of other languages, including Dutch, Italian and Swedish, fell out of scientific use along the way. Gordin is a historian of science at Princeton University. The text breaks off mid-sentence in the source, so the closing discussion of nationalism and language is not reflected here.