Usor:Tchougreeff/CUR sive WHY

Recently in a letter exchange with a friend of mine, Prof. Andreas Savin of Sorbonne, Paris, a reference to a remarkable book “Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English” by Michael D. Gordin came up to surface. Among other issues the title itself invites to a discussion of an intriguing question ”how it will be After Global English”. The author of the present preface actually has experience with three epochs: he started before the Global English and published quite a good portion of his work in Russian, then for many years published in English culminating in a 350 page monograph - quite a contribution to scientific exchange in this language. Writing that monumental (I am not kidding) piece led to a collision with the editors of rather specific fashion: after having everything written, sent to editors, corrected by them for minor language flaws, for unclear expressions by myself, etc., etc., I received a notice (from the responsible editor) suggesting to “reformulate the text so that the phrases were shorter”, that is, to rewrite the 350 pages book. I replied somewhat cocky in that sense that the length of my phrases derives from the length of my thoughts. This reflects a kind of internal contradiction of the modern English as a language of Science: certain lack of the means of maintaining the connectivity of the text. In English almost only the articles can be used for this purpose. In variance with that in well inflected languages like Russian and in Latin even to a higher degree the means of maintaining connectivity are extraordinary abundant. Thus in order to reconstruct (Wiederaufbau) the ancient connectivity of Scientific texts and by force of that the way Scientists think an attempt to (re)create a platform supporting somewhat better connectivity seems to be worth of trying.

For sure whatever reader of these lines is aware about attempts to construct (auxiliary) platforms for scientific exchange. It is an important lesson to be learned from Gordin's book that rationally designed (scientific) languages all failed starting from John Wilkes through Leibnitz to Zamengof and finally to Oswald. It is, of course, of interest to find out what might be the reason. It is to our opinion the contradiction of the goals and boundary conditions set by respective constructors of such languages and the nature of a language as such. Specifically, it goes about the idea of univocality of the language to be constructed: that is of a unique and single way of expressing whatever concept or relation. From a general humanistic/philological point of view the idea of univocality accepted in all mentioned constructs, leads to failure. Doing this removes the redundancy present in whatever natural language. Sure, reducing redundancy makes communication more economic, but with no redundancy the communication is not error prone any more, but even worse the lack of redundancy leaves no space and no resource for any creative activity. The very idea of having a language where each word has a unique meaning and each meaning being expressed by a unique word (or even worse - a morpheme, e.g. suffix) led to a disaster: to an impotence of creating new semantic which is an utter need for a scientific language. In what is called a natural language thus not having rigid connection between word and its meaning one can simply take an existing word and ascribe to it a new desired sense. Obviously, the richer is the cultural background of a given language (here we do not distinguish a priori between the natural and artificial - constructed - designed languages, but mention that whatever natural language has a richer cultural background than any designed language in statu nascendi) the better suits this language for being scientific and for whatever other purpose. Namely the lack of cultural background led all artificial languages to failure. Learning any newly designed one opens an option of communication with other few its adepts. Not the case when learning a natural language: French is not the language of Académie: it is language of all French, dead and alive, like Christian Church is not that of Bischofkonferenz or even of the Pope rather the собор Synaxis of all Christians, dead and alive, led by the Christ himself and all promulgators of artificial languages are simply sectarians with all consequences of this and in the first place impotence and fruitlessness. Their leaders consistently show all thinkable vices: arrogance, ignorance, stubborness, mendacity, intriguery...

Lack of background or "roots" plays a bad joke again and again: if one sets 16 rules like Zamengof, why not to change them a week later? Why all roots must be cons+vowel+cons like in Volapük and not cons+cons+cons like in Semitic languages? Why one should have one agreement class (number of adjective and noun in Esperanto) and not 15 like in Swahili? All natural languages have their drawbacks, fine; but with all their drawbacks they cannot be “reformed” momentarily and this helps to maintain diachronic connectivity and to profit from this background for the further development. Native (literate) French speaker without any significant complication is able to read a XVI-th century French. In contemporary Russian the word today meaning “airplane” is documented in early XVIII century; remarkably none of the words invented in the beginning of XX century for covering the emerging realm of aviation survived in the language.

Among other failed attempts Peano's Latine sine flexione deserves an attention and discussion in our context. A quotation is remarkable:

"Lingua latina fuit internationalis in omni scientia, ab imperio Romano, usque ad finem saeculi XVIII. Hodie multi reputant illam nimis difficilem esse, iam in scientia, magis in commercio. Sed non tota lingua latina est necessaria; parva pars sufficit ad exprimendam quamlibet ideam.15" - Peano

In his attempt Peano decided to escape all problematic or 'too complex' elements of the language whatever it costs. From his point of view it was inflection. However, the lack of connectivity caused by removal of inflection had not been anyhow compensated: in natural languages of Roman-German stem it is done by articles, but they have not been allowed to the Peano's construct as well as too much confusing. Remarkably, from certain point of view the "Victorian" English could be considered as a version of the Peano's idea of Latine sine flexione: as compared to Latin itself inflection is reduced to minimum (Peano himself in the above excerpt could not avoid Accusativus, Ablativus & Genitivus), the scientific terms are borrowed from Latin and Greek and the (Germanic) origin of the connectors is immaterial (the connectivity scheme based on articles is at least tolerable). The problems started accumulate when Basic English turned into native language of the members of Scientific community. Richness of Latin and Greek turned unaccessible or at least required special efforts for a big fraction of the "players". What was expressed by a "Latin" word in the Victorian English turned into "pop-up"- and "drop-down"-like forms in the speech (and writes) of the native speakers of Basic English. The simplicity as well played a bad joke: as a Russian proverb says: "simplicity is worse than theft" and it is: because of the stolen complexity. At the same time the "complexity" of the language as such does not represent a big problem. Another quotation from the Gordin's book sounds pretty adequate:

"[Latin] was also spoken, as a matter of course, by senators, slaves, four-year-old children, and village idiots for hundreds of years as the language of one city, and then across the sprawling Roman Empire—encompassing what is today France, parts of Britain (for a while), Spain and Portugal, North Africa, Egypt, much of the Middle East, Turkey, and the Balkans. What strikes the student as an immensely complicated structure was ordinary, everyday language, no more difficult to grasp than the native Anglophone’s easy choice of a, the, or nothing to preface nouns." - Gordin

Moreover, in our days the complication related to the inflection actually does not exist any more (for a written language), since the internet dictionaries provide for each word the entire inflection paradigm.

Turning back to the problematic of generating new scientific terms

Some further remarks need to be made. First, current way of teaching Latin is mainly aimed to passive command of the language: that is capacity to read Latin texts. It is considered to be “higher pilotage” to be able to read classical authors: Caesar, Cicero and others. Reading medieval (or of XVII - XVIII centuries) authors is on one hand considered to be of use only for much smaller group of students - those specializing in history/literature/philosophy of the respective period, on the other hand, as something which is going to spoil the taste due to flaws in the language of those periods. This way of teaching has already a long story: say, even the most prominent Russian textbook of Latin grammar [Sob.] sets namely the capacity of reading classical authors as the most exalted goal of the curriculum intended to resurrect the teaching of classical languages in the Soviet Union 30 years after the catastrophy of 1917. It in way follows the goal of studying Latin prescribed by the last pre-revolutionary reform of the Russian gymnasium: namely, to assure the capacity of reading, rather than expressing oneself in Latin was set as a purpose in variance with the goals set previously. Obviously, studying rather sophisticated language having in mind only its passive usage contradicts to the fundamental function of whatever language: communication, the capacity to express oneself. This is, of course, realized by the modern Latin teachers, who try to liven up their lessons by introducing exercises on active usage and even providing specialized courses of colloquial “modern” Latin. Although, adding fun to the learning (and teaching) the passive Latin, the colloquial Latin is by itself of little use: placing an order in a restaurant in it will hardly lead to a good dinner.

Again the current author's experience says that main problems when starting writing in a new language lays not in the lack of colloquial skills, rather that of writing, which is not the same.

The founders of CHITEL (Del Re) had very special reasons to push further “Latin” way of expression in science.

Difference between the medieval and classical Latin does not reduce to the declined sophistication; it is much more profound: it is the difference in the way of thinking: true (classical) Romans thought differently, not like we do, and our way of thinking is fundamentally set in Middle Ages. This, not the nonexistent “simplicity” or “primitiveness”, makes Occam's or Aquinat's language much more comprehensible to us.