Well, you may have realised that I’m a Chinese. So why do I use English instead of Chinese?
Yes, Chinese, or more accurately, Mandarin, is my first language, and I’ve been learning chinese since I was a baby, about two or three years old. But a fact is that most chinese people no longer enjoy reading articles written by chinese people after leaving schools. The part of the reason is that most chinese people now have a busy lifestyle. They don’t have time to take a trip, go for a walk after dinner, talk with their neighbours, play with their children, watch TV, let alone read. It wasn’t like this about one hundred years ago. At the time, reading newspaper was the only way for average people to get information, and there were many insightful articles written by contermorary critics, one of them is my favorite writter 鲁迅. They raised different voices and argued about their views through their articles. But nowadays everything has changed. There seems to be an invisible force that making such phenomenon disappear. There seems to be an invisible force that prevents people from thinking deeply from reading. And whenever you make a viewpoint, there’ll always be someone to contradict your viewpoint with expletives. There seems to be an invisible force that keeps people from tolerating objections. So, that’s why I don’t like writting in Chinese.
Well, I’d also like to talk a little bit about the history of English. World science is dominated today by a small number of languages, and English seems to be the most populare global language of science. There is no doubt that this is because of the importance of English-speaking countries such as the USA in scientific research, so, scientists of many non-English-speaking countries, like China, find that they need to write their research papers in English to reach a wide international audience. Actually, I’m always be amazed at the ability of Chinese graduates to write long dissertations. It seems that they don’t have much time to practice their English skills but they still write long dissertations in English.
Ok, back to our topic.
Was it like that before? Actually, no one really knew how to write science in English before the 17th century, and before that, Latin was regarded as the lingua franca for European intellectuals. We all know that Copernicus developed a new theories of astronomy and the movement of the Earth in relation to the planets and stars in the 15th century, and England was one of the first countries where scientists adopted and publicized Copernican ideads with enthusiasm.
The 17th century was a formative period in the establishment of scientific English. Obvisouly, English was not well equipped to deal with scientific argument in early period. First, it lacked the necessary technical vocabulary. Second, it lacked the grammatical resources required to represent the world in an objective and impersonal way, and to discuss the relations, such as cause and effect, that might hold between comple and hypothetical entities. Fortunately, several members of the Royal Society possessed an interest in language and became engaged in various linguistic projects. Although a proposal in 1664 to establish a committee for improving the English language came to little, the society’s members did a great deal to foster the publication of science in English and to encourage the development of a suitable writing style, and many members of the Royal Society also published monographs in English. For example, Robert Hooke, the society’s first curator of experiments, described his experiments with microscopes in Micrographia in 1665, and later Newton published his mathematical treatise, known as the Principia, in Latin in 1687, but published his later work on the properties of light - Opticks - in English in 1701.
Although in the following century the English language lost much of its momentum, scientific English again enjoyed substantial lexical growth in the 19th century as the industrial revolution created the need for new technical vocabulary, and new specialised professional societies were instituted to promote and publish in the new disciplines.