Answer the following questions

1. Why did the author give such a title to the text?

2. What languages could Werner Heisenberg speak?

3. Do science students speak other languages (except the native one)? Give your reasons.

4. What languages were important (in order of importance) in the scientific world 200 years before World War II?

5. What languages could N.Bohr speak?

6. How was dominance of languages changed after World War II? Why?

7. What is the role of English in the scientific world now?

IMPERIAL ENGLISH: THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE?

1. Werner Heisenberg learned Latin, Greek and French when he was a gymnasium student in Munich. Later he tackled English and Danish. This is not the kind of anecdote we associate with today's science majors in the US, that resolutely monolingual lot. Science students here are rarely to be found in a school language lab, much less a spontaneous one, and when they do speak another language it is usually because of family background, not classroom instruction. Then they graduate, attend a conference with colleagues from other countries and discover their linguistic incompetence.

2. We are the people who can no longer be both­ered to learn another language. To be sure, we really haven't had to since the 1960s, for in the years since World War II English has gradually but inexorably become the lingua franca of sci­ence. Today it is the universal currency of interna­tional publications as well as of meetings. Those of us who need to keep up with, need not worry about mastering German; we can leave it to the journal's staff, whose English is no doubt immaculate, to provide us with a convenient international edition published in English.

3. It wasn't always this way. For the 200 years before World War II, most scientific work was reported in German, French or English, in that order of importance. People who wanted to keep up with a specialization had to learn the domi­nant language of the field. For example, scientists who wished to understand quantum mechanics in the 1920s had to learn German. Sir Nevill Mott comments, "Apart from Dirac, I don't think any­one in Cambridge understood (quantum mechanics) very well; there were no lectures on it, and so the only thing to do was to learn German and read the original papers, particularly those of Schrodinger and Born's "Wave Mechanics of Collision Processes"."

4. German, French and English were the customary languages of meetings, too. At Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, for example, John A. Wheeler recalls that most seminars were held in German, occasional­ly in English. Bohr, who spoke English and German with equal ease, fluctuated between them, adding Danish as counterpoint. No one had to learn French, though, for Bohr's knowledge of it was limited.

5.After World War II, the linguistic balance of power shifted. US scientists flocked to confer­ences, bringing their language with them; US sci­entific publications burgeoned, and their huge readerships made them highly desirable to scien­tists throughout the world who realized English was a medium through which they could be wide­ly read and cited.

Professor Anne Eisenberg

8. Look through the list of words and phrases and check if you know their Ukrainian equivalents. Use the Mini-Dictionary (UNIT 2) if necessary.