Creating scientific terminology for African languages
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Article in Nature
"African languages to get more bespoke scientific terms: Many words common to science have never been written in African languages. Now, researchers from across Africa are changing that", Sarah Wild, Nature 596, 469-470 (August 18, 2021)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02218-x
Here are some selected passages:
There’s no original isiZulu word for dinosaur. Germs are called amagciwane, but there are no separate words for viruses or bacteria. A quark is ikhwakhi (pronounced kwa-ki); there is no term for red shift. And researchers and science communicators using the language, which is spoken by more than 14 million people in southern Africa, struggle to agree on words for evolution.
IsiZulu is one of approximately 2,000 languages spoken in Africa. Modern science has ignored the overwhelming majority of these languages, but now a team of researchers from Africa wants to change that.
A research project called Decolonise Science plans to translate 180 scientific papers from the AfricArXiv preprint server into 6 African languages: isiZulu and Northern Sotho from southern Africa; Hausa and Yoruba from West Africa; and Luganda and Amharic from East Africa.
…
The translated papers will span many disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The project is being supported by the Lacuna Fund, a data-science funder for researchers in low- and middle-income countries. It was launched a year ago by philanthropic and government funders from Europe and North America, and Google.
Languages left behind
The lack of scientific terms in African languages has real-world consequences, particularly in education. In South Africa, for example, less than 10% of citizens speak English as their home language, but it is the main teaching language in schools — something that scholars say is an obstacle to learning science and mathematics.
…
The Decolonise Science project is one of many initiatives that the group is undertaking; others include detecting hate speech in Nigeria and teaching machine-learning algorithms to recognize African names and places.
…
Terminology creation
Decolonise Science will employ translators to work on papers from AfricArXiv for which the first author is African, says principal investigator Jade Abbott, a machine-learning specialist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Words that do not have an equivalent in the target language will be flagged so that terminology specialists and science communicators can develop new terms. “It is not like translating a book, where the words might exist,” Abbott says. “This is a terminology-creating exercise.”
But “we don’t want to come up with a new word completely”, adds Sibusiso Biyela, a writer at ScienceLink, a science-communication company based in Johannesburg that is a partner in the project. “We want the person who reads that article or term to understand what it means the first time they see it.”
…
Biyela, who writes about science in isiZulu, often derives new terms by looking at the Greek or Latin roots of existing scientific words in English. Planet, for example, comes from the ancient Greek planētēs, meaning ‘wanderer’, because planets were perceived to move through the night sky. In isiZulu, this becomes umhambi, which also means wanderer. Another word for planet, used in school dictionaries, is umhlaba, which means ‘Earth’ or ‘world’. Other terms are descriptive: for ‘fossil’, for example, Biyela coined the phrase amathambo amadala atholakala emhlabathini, or ‘old bones found in the ground’.
…
Is this the best way to approach the problem of the lack of scientific terminology in African languages. Have the researchers and activists overlooked something that may facilitate the process?
Selected readings
- "'English will not be longer problem for your!'" (3/17/15)
- "Macaque and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/17/20)
- "Makaku, macaco, macaque, macaca…" (8/16/06)
- "African (il)literacy" (6/21/21)
- How rapidly and radically can a language evolve?" (7/27/17) — see in the comments for remarks on African languages
- "Latino-Punic" (7/6/07)
alex wang said,
August 25, 2021 @ 12:02 am
Looking forward to reading insights in the comments. Ive always wondered about how languages rapidly absorb new words.
David Marjanović said,
August 25, 2021 @ 1:20 am
German went through several rounds of this. A lot of loans have ended up in common use nevertheless.
Not every fossil is a bone, by the way. Most aren't.
Philip Taylor said,
August 25, 2021 @ 1:39 am
"Is this the best way to approach the problem of the lack of scientific terminology in African languages ?". I think that this begs the question. Is there any evidence that the lack of scientific terminology in African languages is a problem ?
cliff arroyo said,
August 25, 2021 @ 2:15 am
I think that integrating African languages more into education and government is a great idea, but….
This seems kind of top down, wouldn't it be far more effective to start from the bottom up?
I would start with very elementary science books for children and then slowly work up in level.
Also combine this with reading and writing contests for children with attractive prizes.
Mae E. Sander said,
August 25, 2021 @ 5:48 am
“We want the person who reads that article or term to understand what it means the first time they see it.” — Does this happen the first time that a native speaker of English or another science-originating language sees a scientific term in their native language? For example, the term "quark" — who would know what it meant the first time they saw it?
Victor Mair said,
August 25, 2021 @ 6:15 am
How did the people of Iceland do it?
For that matter, how about the people of Japan, a highly scientifically developed nation, whose methods of linguistic modernization we have discussed a lot on Language Log: a combination of translation and transcription?
Bob Ladd said,
August 25, 2021 @ 6:55 am
What David Marjanović said, more or less.
If you are a speaker of one of the African languages in question and want to talk *in your own language* about something scientific for which there is an existing term in English or some other widely-used language, there are basically two approaches: borrow/adapt the English (etc.) word, or create a new word from existing roots in your own language. I don't know of any evidence that one approach is superior to the other. Icelandic (to judge from a few minutes' exploration on Google Translate) seems to make a lot of use of the second approach; by contrast, German (as David Marjanović says) has gone through several rounds of resisting borrowing/adaptation over the past several centuries, but these days seems entirely content to accept widely used general European terms (compare the German and Icelandic translations of "subduction zone" on Google).
But (pace Philip Taylor), if you are a budding scientist and a native speaker of isiZulu, it *is* a problem if you don't have any terms at all for the things you want to learn about.
Philip Taylor said,
August 25, 2021 @ 7:03 am
Bob — I take your point, but does the fact that there is (or was) no isiZulu word for "quark" prevent such a native speaker / budding scientist from learning about such things ? Presumably a native speaker of isiZulu who is himself an established author and scientist would, if he sought to educate fellow speakers of isiZulu, simply publish in isiZulu but use (and gloss) English words for those terms for which no isiZulu word exists.
Andrsew Usher said,
August 25, 2021 @ 7:28 am
This is of course backwards: if a language lacks a scientific vocabulary, it is because scientific concepts are not discussed in it. Inventing one isn't going to change that. Rather, if and when a language starts being used for scientific discussion, it will acquire the requisite words, whether by borrowing or native formation, as speakers will feel a need to. All major European languages went through this process, but today English is so dominant that other languages that haven't yet acquired a scientific vocabulary may never feel that need.
But frankly, projects like this are often more to benefits the people running them than anything else, and that's hardly confined to Africa.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
Jerry Friedman said,
August 25, 2021 @ 8:11 am
Most English scientific terminology is borrowed, sometimes with some anglicization. That has probably created some barriers, but we seem to manage. Is the reason for this effort more that English and other possible sources of loanwords are seen as connected to colonization?
KeithB said,
August 25, 2021 @ 8:42 am
The Navajo Codetalkers faced this. There was no word in Navajo for "Submarine", for example, so they had to make one up. We recently had a talk about the Codetalkers where they listed some of the literal translations of the words they chose. It is on my other computer and I will share it tonight.
Bloix said,
August 25, 2021 @ 9:03 am
Andrew Usher –
For generations, missionaries have understood the necessity of making texts available in the languages of the peoples they are trying to convert. All or parts of the Bible have been translated into over 1000 African languages – including, of course, Zulu. The complete Bible has been available in Zulu since 1883 and the translation has been revised and updated repeatedly since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations_into_the_languages_of_Africa
Christians have known for a millennium or two that in order to persuade ordinary people to accept something, you have to be able to explain it to them in their own language. Perhaps secular folk could come to understand this as well.
cliff arroyo said,
August 25, 2021 @ 9:12 am
"if a language lacks a scientific vocabulary,"
That was part of my point, you need to get people interested in the idea of science in Zulu or Hausa and that's done most effectively with children.
"English is so dominant that other languages that haven't yet acquired a scientific vocabulary may never feel that need."
But is that a good thing? If so, then why?
Bloix said,
August 25, 2021 @ 9:39 am
"English is so dominant that other languages that haven't yet acquired a scientific vocabulary may never feel that need."
It's probably true that scientists, engineers, and medical personnel will always need English or another "major" language for their education and work.
But if you expect a country to have an educated populace that can understand what a vaccine does, or why climate change is a threat, or how birth control works, then you need to be able to discuss these things in the languages of the country.
Robyn Hamilton said,
August 25, 2021 @ 10:07 am
Quebec has a good process for this for French.
Andreas Johansson said,
August 25, 2021 @ 10:08 am
Words like "virus" and "bacterium" may be scientific terminology in a sufficiently wide sense, but being unable to easily make the distinction sounds like a public health problem, quite apart from anyone's desire to do medical or biological research in Zulu.
The name "Decolonise Science", though, makes it hard to avoid the suspicion the motivation is more ideological than practical, as does the apparent emphasis on using native roots rather than loans.
Bob Ladd said,
August 25, 2021 @ 10:12 am
Bloix has just said clearly part of what I was trying to say – thanks!
Cervantes said,
August 25, 2021 @ 10:34 am
Every language has had to add words for new discoveries and technologies. Why not just call planets planets and fossils fossils in African languages? You're making up new words anyway. Call things by the universal scientific names, that's much less patronizing, easier, and more useful.
Victor Mair said,
August 25, 2021 @ 10:55 am
@Robyn Hamilton
Please tell us how the Québécois do it.
Bob Michael said,
August 25, 2021 @ 1:39 pm
I have a negative reaction against using terms like “ amathambo amadala atholakala emhlabathini” meaning ‘old bones found in the ground’ for “fossil”. First, the term is inaccurate. There can be fossils of invertebrates, so no bones need to be involved. Secondly, scientists of all nations need to converge on more universal words for concepts. Adapt international words to the phonology and morphology of the language. Where there is no universal word, create a word, not a clumsy phrase that’s open to multiple interpretations.
Mehmet Oguz Derin said,
August 25, 2021 @ 1:54 pm
I think I can give a rough idea about how terminology injection happens mainly in Turkish due to my course translation experience. When a field has no correspondences handbook (like the ones from the Turkish Language Association) to look up, people usually copy the English term directly and use the inflectional (including denominal verbalizers like -la in this instance) to do the translation. This approach works well but increases the bar to understanding, plus the unfortunate risk of pronunciation overlapping with existing words requiring some contextual ear (or eye) acquaintance to form. On the other hand, if a correspondences handbook (which might very well be listing copied terms on many occasions) exists, those include derived words from Turkish stems. The derivations work great when people construct them with care and attention to how the bound morphemes work. Still, that's not the case in many cases, resulting in crazy artificial sounding words with actually not-so-corresponding-meaning if you decompose it and put it into a comparative context, which means you again the consumer to form the acquaintance, ugh. A complex task, but I would personally prefer the second option, word extension, if done right.
Though take my words with a grain bit of salt because I only did it once (for >200 pages of content) and still have not got around to contributing an essence of my experience to making things better for future translations!
James Wimberley said,
August 25, 2021 @ 3:53 pm
Let me throw in an idea here: language twinning. Catalan has a similar
number of speakers as Zulu (10m / 20m), and is also struggling to stay alive as a vehicle for science and other forms of high culture- but the community is much richer. They could learn from each other.
Cuconnachr said,
August 25, 2021 @ 5:38 pm
Even leaving aside David Marjanović's point that not all fossils are bones, how would English speakers be better off if, instead of borrowing and Anglicizing French fossile, we had instead called them "old bones (or "things" or "remains"or whatever) found in the ground"?
Seth said,
August 25, 2021 @ 6:34 pm
@KeithB I wonder if the "submarine" example had any connection to a running joke in the Discworld novels, where a brilliant inventor comes up with long unwieldy names for his creations. As in, he invents the submarine, but calls it the "Going-Under-The-Water-Safely Device"
Stephen L said,
August 26, 2021 @ 4:07 am
I really like Microsoft's translation portal – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/language/Search?&searchTerm=undo&langID=6&Source=true&productid=0
They've basically made available all their technical translations across all languages/software for free. It's really valuable for me for German, though I've heard their translations aren't uniformly good. Anyway, I assume that for a lot of languages the translators have to make up terminology as they go.
I remember reading an interview with an Irish-language tennis commentator, who said she had to invent a bunch of new terminology as she went.
On the topic of up-to-dating languages I was trying to translate a piece of software into Latin recently, and wasn't able to decide what verb-form to put on buttons – for 'open' etc. (most romance languages nowadays use the infinitive form, but why not the imperative?).
~flow said,
August 26, 2021 @ 4:12 am
The German Wikipedia article for 'submarine' ('U-Boot', https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-Boot) starts as follows:
"Ein U-Boot (kurz für Unterseeboot; militärische Schreibweise Uboot ohne Bindestrich) ist ein Boot, das für die Unterwasserfahrt gebaut wurde. Moderne große U-Boote, die eine Masse von bis zu 26.000 Tonnen haben können, werden auch U-Schiffe genannt.
Der Ausdruck U-Boot bezeichnet speziell ein militärisch verwendetes Unterwasserboot. Zivile U-Boote, ob kommerziell oder für die Forschung, werden meist als Tauchboot bezeichnet."
That 'U-Boot' is short for 'Unterseeboot' (like 'U-Bahn' for 'Untergrund(eisen)bahn') I did already know. You virtually never hear 'Unterseeboot' though. That you can also write it 'Uboot' is news to me. New Terms here I cannot remember having seen or heard before include 'U-Schiffe', 'Unterwasserboot'. 'Tauchboot' looks so familiar but I am not sure. All these terms are readily understandable to me, even though unfamiliar, as is 'Unterwasserfahrt' (sub-surface cruising, I guess?). Conspicuously absent from the article is the coinage 'submarine' except in English contexts (names and titles), be it in its English or in its German-Latin form. 'Das Submarine Boot' (S-Boot??) *could* be a German word but isn't. BTW "Als erstes funktionsfähiges U-Boot der Welt gilt die Sub Marine Explorer, [es] wurde 1865 von dem Deutsch-US-Amerikaner Julius Kröhl […] gebaut", so maybe a German emigrant is the one responsible for the term 'submarine', at least he picked it up early on.
The German Wikipedia article for 'jetstream' ('Jetstream'; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetstream) starts as follows:
"Jetstream (von englisch jet stream, eine Übersetzung des deutschen Wortes Strahlstrom)[1] wird in der Meteorologie ein sich dynamisch verlagerndes Starkwindband genannt, das meist im Bereich der oberen Troposphäre bis zur Tropopause auftritt."
So here is another German coinage, but this one—'Strahlstrom' for 'jetstream'—is one I only learned very recently. First coined in German using German (not Latin or Greek) morphemes, then translated into English and in this form re-introduced to German speakers. Now, even when German speakers explain the concept of 'jetstream' to a German-speaking audience, they will most likely *not* use 'Strahlstrom', for one because they and their audience likely won't know the coinage, and two because for some reason it's hard to guess from its components what it's supposed to mean.
Turning to computers, there's 'cybernetics', G. 'Kybernetik', coined by Norbert Wiener after a Greek word already found in Homer (albeit not in the modern sense, oc), explained as 'die Kunst des Steuerns/Regelns', translated as 'Regelungstechnik' (again see Wikipedia). 'Regelungstechnik'/'Regeltechnik' is a common word tho I doubt many native speakers will treat is as equivalent to 'Kybernetik'. Words like 'cyberthreats' are readily used as-is in German, others, like 'cyber-security', are more often than not translated, as in 'Rechnersicherheit' ('Rechner' being the equivalent of 'Computer', both very common). So 'Kybernetik' ([ky:bɐ-]) is always used in its German form, but it seemingly does not readily compound, you have to use the English form 'Cyber-' ([saibɐ-]) for that.
To close, 'Stack' (in computer science) is most often read [ʃtæk], [ʃtɛk] which is half German, half English. Wouldn't you believe it also has a German origin, 'Stapelspeicher' or 'Kellerspeicher'. Incidentally, I personally learned the German words in the late 70s already, and they confused me. 'Stapel(speicher)' seemed OK to me, but 'Keller(speicher)'? Wat? It does get worse though: at https://www.telle-online.de/fernuni/ruf/klausur/1704-97.html, I find
"Einheit für einen Mikroprozessor, die die Operation 'pusha' und 'popa' auf dem Stack (Kellerstapelspeicher) überwacht. […] Befehl "pusha" erhöht den Stackzeiger SP (Register des Mirkoprozessors) und speichert den Wert des Akkumulators auf der durch den Stackzeiger SP […]"
'Kellerstapelspeicher' (!) is a term I definitely remember being used back in the day. 'Keller-Stapel-Speicher'. It's almost as bad as 'amathambo amadala atholakala emhlabathini' for 'fossil' when it comes to usability. Observe how German uses orthographical hints to indicate use of G. 1:1 equivalents with G. pronunciation ('Mikroprozessor', 'Akkumulator'). 'Stackzeiger' is cute, too; it has little chance to survive though when you feel forced to use 'SP' as its abbreviation (which you will want to in order not to loose connction with the vast majority of published material), and I guess it's been overrun by the 'Stackpointers' [ʃtɛkpointɐs] of this world already.
I cannot imagine planning for this kind of linguistic situation, but people have done it in German, the vocabulary being rife with deliberate coinages, some made centuries ago. Werner Betz observed in 1974 that in the sentence "Am vergangenen Freitag nahm der Großvater des Herzogs, mit Rücksicht auf die Beschwerden der Untertanen, an einer Sitzung in der Hauptstadt teil." only the articles and the prepositions are 'original German', the other being 'loan coinages' ("Lehnprägungen").
Peter Taylor said,
August 26, 2021 @ 5:10 am
is an interesting perspective on agency.
Bloix wrote:
They've also faced the issues of inventing words where they couldn't find existing ones. I know that in Quichua they went heavily for loan-words, to the point where I have a Quichua hymn book called "Sumajdiosta cantanami" (three Spanish words with some Quichua inflexions) which contains obvious derivations from Spanish words for God, Holy Spirit, glory, heaven, praise, angel, Bible, … Some of those again are obvious loan words from Greek.Stephen L wrote:
I've had the occasional good laugh with Microsoft's translations into Spanish. The best one was the menu entry when I right-clicked a file, offering to digitalise the file with Microsoft Defender. Back-translating to English, it's obvious that someone who was missing context chose the wrong meaning of "scan".
~flow said,
August 26, 2021 @ 6:58 am
The Microsoft translation DB is certainly a treasure trove.
For 'undo' they offer 'rückgängig machen', 'widerrufen' which are both very reasonable, but they also have 'Rollbackphase' which I'd pronounce as DEnglish rollback [ro:lbɛk] + German 'Phase' [fa:zə]. This shows the deep integration that English has achieved in German.
There's also 'Rückgängig-Datenträger' for a specialized sense of the word. Now that's a highly inelegant term but I'd be at a loss what else to call it.
Victor Mair said,
August 26, 2021 @ 7:20 am
Some past Language Log posts relevant to this one:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001640.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003398.html
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=915
Victor Mair said,
August 26, 2021 @ 7:29 am
Going the other direction, I had a Ghanaian friend with the surname "Agbezuge", which was creatively formed around the German word for "train".
Bloix said,
August 26, 2021 @ 8:14 am
Peter Taylor advises that missionaries translating Christian texts into Quichua "went in heavily for loan words."
IANALingust and I'd be happy to be corrected, but in my experience it's very easy for people to borrow another language's nouns, and to modify them suitably to fit their own language's rules of pronunciation, gender, case, pluralization, compounding, conversion to verbs and adjectives, etc. People seem to do this almost instinctively.
It's much harder for people, particularly adults, to learn another language even at the "where is the bus stop" level.
I suggest that if you assume that it's necessary to teach people English before you can teach how different infectious diseases spread, a very high percentage of them will never even begin to understand it. But if you can introduce standardized versions of words like "bacteria" and "virus," properly inflected and easily pronounced, at least you've made a start.
No, it won't be enough to train physicians. But it will help in training nurses and other health professionals. It shouldn't be necessary to speak English in order to train to be a health worker in a rural community.
Bloix said,
August 26, 2021 @ 8:41 am
PS-
I do think it's a mistake to base newly invented words on the etymology of the English terms – etymologies that almost no English speakers know or care about. For example, using the Zulu word for "wanderer" as the word for planet seems wrongheaded. The ancient Greeks thought of the planets as wandering because they don't have fixed positions in the constellations. But it makes no sense today to have to teach the mythical constellations in order to teach the real planets. And this would become a widespread problem – the etymologies of older scientific terms are often based on errors or on outdated and culturally specific beliefs. If you make up new words based on the etymologies, you're just forcing yourself to teach mistakes.
Trogluddite said,
August 26, 2021 @ 8:49 am
Obviously unusual borrowings or neologisms (within the bounds of local phonotactics) might be a feature rather than a bug, as everyday words and roots can bring with them distracting associations. For example; I have heard it said several times (e.g. in John Gribbin's popular science books) that the use of everyday English words such as "spin", "particle", "shell", etc. as quantum mechanics jargon often leads people to construct mental models of what quantum objects "look" or behave like which hamper comprehension of what the the theory actually does or does not imply.
Such problems seem far less likely for an obvious neologism such as "quark", which doesn't evoke previously learned connotations or analogies, and the same is likely true to a lesser extent of the many cod-Latin/Greek terms used in English, even for those of us able to deduce their often misleading etymology.
I'm not suggesting that productive local rules for e.g. generating compound words should be ignored where available; but "words understood when first seen" (even if such a thing were possible) is not necessarily a good guiding principle – it could be a recipe for misleading analogies and connotations, or clumsy phrases which *describe* where snappy words which *denote* are what is called for.
Rodger C said,
August 26, 2021 @ 10:17 am
fossilia are of course simply "things that get dug up." How do you say that (hopefully in one word) in Zulu?
Bloix said,
August 26, 2021 @ 11:52 am
Rodger C – again, this is the tyranny of the etymology. The word fossil was coined from the Latin for dug up, but we now use the word for things that were not dug up –
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/10/fossil-footprints-tell-story-prehistoric-parents-journey
– and there are plenty of dug-up ancient things that aren't fossils, e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_body
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ring_Lady.JPG
The crucial thing about a fossil is that it's formed by the replacement or in-filling of the original material by minerals, usually although not always by a process involving water transport. It's a natural cast, in stone. "Dug up thing" misses the point completely.
This poses no problem for English speakers who use the word fossil, because virtually no one is aware of the etymology, and those who are aware of it are sophisticated enough not to be misled by it. But why provide bad information when you're coining a word for people who have no understanding at all of what you're naming?
Stephen L said,
August 26, 2021 @ 1:47 pm
@~flow
I find it amusing that "rückgängig" is the only menu command that's an adjective (The rest are all infinitive verbs IIRC )
J.W. Brewer said,
August 26, 2021 @ 3:07 pm
"There’s no original isiZulu word for dinosaur," says the article, but I suspect that this claim is true only for a sense of "original" in which it is equally true that there's no original English word for dinosaur.
I think a reasonably high percentage of Anglophones know the Greek roots of the Late Latin coinage "dinosaurus," which English then borrowed/clipped, just because a lot of kids have a dinosaur phase and "terrible lizard" is a pretty darn cool etymology for dinosaur-phase-aged kids. But how many know the Greek roots in e.g. "hypodermic"?* Does that interfere with their ability to understand and use the word?
*In fact "hyperdermic" seems to be a reasonably common misspelling because the vast majority of Anglophones without specialized education do not think of hyper- and hypo- as not only distinct in meaning but opposite in meaning.
cliff arroyo said,
August 26, 2021 @ 3:21 pm
I think that when trying to initiate scientific discourse in a language where that has been previously discouraged or neglected… the important thing is to not leave anything off the table, borrowing, neologisms, paraphrase..
Any final successful result will surely be a mess of neologisms and borrowings (like scientific vocabulary in…. all(?) languages.
It's only by experimenting and trying different approaches that the best approach will be revealed / will reveal itself.
This is also why I think such efforts need to start with very basic texts for beginners (like children) which can be built upon over time.
This project sounds more like a stunt than anything else.
David Marjanović said,
August 26, 2021 @ 3:29 pm
Imperatives imply "do this! Now!" – that would be misleading. "In order to [infinitive], click here" makes much more sense.
That mode of preservation – called Steinkern in English, while I'm at it – is not the most common one. Most often, minerals that precipitate out of the ground water just fill in the spaces, but the original substance remains in place. (At most it recrystallizes to varying extents.)
Ghana was British – do you mean Togo or perhaps Cameroon? And why would the spelling of Zug be borrowed instead of its pronunciation (the language in question probably doesn't have a [ts], but [s] would obviously be closer than [z])?
Bloix said,
August 26, 2021 @ 5:00 pm
You're right in part and wrong in part. The dinosaur bones we think of as the quintessential fossils are not casts. But they contain no bone. The mineralization replaces the original material entirely, and does not just fill in empty space. What is left is a stone replica. I described them as "natural casts" loosely, and admittedly inaccurately, as there is no intermediating mold in their creation.
The American Museum of Natural History explains:
"The most common process of fossilization happens when an animal is buried by sediment, such as sand or silt, shortly after it dies. Its bones are protected from rotting by layers of sediment. As its body decomposes all the fleshy parts wear away and only the hard parts, like bones, teeth, and horns, are left behind. Over millions of years, water in the nearby rocks surrounds these hard parts, and minerals in the water replace them, bit by bit. When the minerals have completely replaced the organic tissue, what's left is a solid rock copy of the original specimen."
https://www.amnh.org/dinosaurs/dinosaur-bones
But whatever the precise process, the point is that the defining fact of a fossil is fossilization, and not digging up.
fossil said,
August 26, 2021 @ 5:35 pm
> Secondly, scientists of all nations need to converge on more universal words for concepts. Adapt international words to the phonology and morphology of the language. Where there is no universal word, create a word, not a clumsy phrase that’s open to multiple interpretations.
Is there an "international word" for fossil or dinosaur, for example? How many scientific terms are the same across China, Germany, the US, Russia and Japan?
David Marjanović said,
August 27, 2021 @ 3:08 am
That is not true. Most of them contain all the original bone; that's why histology and isotope studies can (often) still be done on them – the original atoms are (often) still in place.
This is rare. Opalized bones come to mind: they've been dissolved and the resulting space filled in with opal precipitating from the groundwater.
That understanding is out of date by a few decades. I'm not surprised such a very large museum as the AMNH hasn't managed to update this on a page facing the public.
I'm a vertebrate paleontologist. :-)
Not even necessarily fossilization. One definition of "fossil" is "remains of organisms or their works older than 10000 years", everything younger being a "subfossil".
But your larger point does stand, of course. In the 18th century, mineral resources were called "fossils", but not anymore.
Practically none. Chinese basically always forms technical terms from native morphemes because native morphemes can be written with Chinese characters (…not to mention pronounced).
Some of this actually happened in Japan and was then imported to China in the 19th/early 20th centuries; "economy" is one of a large number of examples.
In primary literature in Chinese, when no equivalent for an English very technical term has yet been coined, the authors coin one and add the English term in brackets.
Tom Dawkes said,
August 27, 2021 @ 6:50 am
On the pressure on "small" languages to be able to discuss science and other non-trivial matters: the Scandinavian languages all have smaller numbers of speakers than Catalan, instanced above, and there is concern among some of their scientists that the pressure/necessity to publish in English is prejudicial to the development of native resources.
Bloix said,
August 27, 2021 @ 10:52 am
David Marjanović –
"That understanding is out of date by a few decades."
This is what happens when you remember what you learned in school – the years go by and eventually it's not true anymore.
Andrew Usher said,
August 27, 2021 @ 5:58 pm
Well, Scandinavian scientists have always felt pressure to _publish_ in other languages, what's new (so I've heard) is that English is now being used as the language for scientific discussion (including university teaching) among them; and naturally some of the native vocabulary then becomes unfamiliar and it may feel unnatural, even, to use their native language for science.
This is clearly (to me) what caused the death of scholarly Latin: when it stopped being used in that universal manner in the 18th century, with analogous effects.
cliff arroyo said,
August 28, 2021 @ 12:42 am
"what's new (so I've heard) is that English is now being used as the language for scientific discussion (including university teaching)"
I've heard about that from someone at a Scandinavian university a few years ago. In this person's case, the idea about teaching in English came from administration (without asking existing teachers/students what they thought). It was not a popular idea and was often ignored in practice: with a quick "Everybody here speak (local language)? Great! Let's go!" at the beginning of the class.
I'm pretty sure the idea for the policy is administration hoping to attract paying foreign (ie Chinese and Indian) students.
Still there was also a complaint about domain loss in the language.
DMT said,
August 28, 2021 @ 12:53 am
@Stephen L, David Marjanović:
I find this little tangent on the inflectional semantics of software UI buttons fascinating. Like Stephen L, my instinctive feeling about the labels on these buttons is that they are usually commands issued by the user to the computer, instructing the computer to perform a certain action (hence imperative).* But if I understand David Marjanović correctly, this is not how speakers of many other languages understand them — the use of the infinitive implies that it is the user who is performing the specified action of saving a file, closing a window, etc. Is that right?
None of the East Asian languages use imperative forms:
– Chinese is ambiguous because of the lack of verbal inflection.
– Japanese often has straight kanji or katakana forms (保存、ダウンロード), omitting suru する "do". When an inflected form is used it is the dictionary form (e.g. 閉じる), so basically like an infinitive.
– Similarly, Korean (로그인, 저장) omits hada 하다 "do". When an inflected form is used, it is the verbal noun form in -gi, also somewhat like an infinitive.
I wonder whether the "imperative" interpretation of these button labels is peculiar to English, or how widely it is shared by English speakers.
*Actually this varies somewhat depending on the button label: my intuition is that "Save", "Open", "Close", etc. are all commands issued to the computer, but something like "Login" only makes sense as an action that the user is choosing to perform.
Philip Taylor said,
August 28, 2021 @ 4:56 am
There are also keys (at least on my IBM clicky keyboards) where the word order is the reverse of that required for an imperative — "caps lock", "num lock", "scroll lock".
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 28, 2021 @ 8:30 am
@Philip Taylor: Aren't Caps Lock etc. better understood as nouns? That's what my native Polish would normally do, i.e. use nouns for many button labels. Software UI translation has almost destroyed this; most of the time, you get imperatives these days, reflecting the English original. But old-school hardware, especially dometically-manufactured, will still prefer deverbal nouns, such as Otwieranie 'opening', to imperatives. And you do get these even within software. For example, Edit was normally rendered as Edycja (the deverbal noun), and I have a non-scientific gut feeling that Edytuj (the imperative) is newer.
Andrew Usher said,
August 28, 2021 @ 12:02 pm
Yes, 'Caps Lock' etc. are nouns. Labeling controls with nouns indicating the function or feature controlled is very common, even on computers; but when a verb is used, we think of it as an imperative.
This was originally brought up in context of what would be appropriate in Latin: I think the infinitive would be, as used of Latin Wikipedia. German, like the Romance group, uses the infinitive also, but from the last post, Polish doesn't. I wonder though, in such languages, how much the different interpretation is caused by, rather than the cause of, the infinitive use.
For I believe some or all those languages can also use the infinitive as a more polite form of the imperative; English uses only periphrastic constructions for that. The most relevant is probably that of giving instructions, where the imperative is normal and neutral, but some do say things like "You'll want to [INFINITIVE]' (which I find patronising) and I suppose reduction of some such could give that substitution.
DMT:
'Login' is an imperative also; it is only spelling it as one word that makes it confusing, as the verb is otherwise two. If I were designing a UI I'd want to insist on the two-word log in there, as it is definitely meant to be a verb, not a noun.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 28, 2021 @ 12:54 pm
@Andrew Usher: Polish does use the infinitive too, as you say, as an alternative to the imperative, or sometimes as the only option, e.g. Nie przeszkadzać 'do not disturb'. But it doesn't use it for UI buttons.
DMT said,
August 28, 2021 @ 2:14 pm
@Andrew Usher:
You're right, I should have written "Log in" – that was just careless typing (possibly influenced by having just typed the hangul for the Korean, where "login" is always a single word).
David Marjanović said,
August 30, 2021 @ 3:58 pm
Yes; the infinitive is interpreted as shorthand for such things as "in order to open a file, click here" or "here you can open a file".
This is not limited to computers; "pull"/"push" on doors is rendered with infinitives, too – interpretable as e.g. "you need to pull to get this door open".
Jonathan Smith said,
August 30, 2021 @ 8:13 pm
?… no, these menu option labels in English aren't in any meaningful sense "imperative" — and many, including "log in," unambiguously reference the user's action, not the machine's. Mostly they're just ambiguous though, like Chinese mentioned above… why not claim they mean, e.g., "Come, let's [X]", and thus are "cohortative" or sth?
George said,
August 31, 2021 @ 5:22 am
At the risk of being accused of trolling (and with the certainty of being accused of pedantry), may I make the off-topic observation that Philip Taylor's use of 'beg the question' in his very first comment on this thread is an excellent illustration of the usefulness of that expression when used in its 'traditional' sense?
Bob Hoberman said,
August 31, 2021 @ 4:03 pm
Hebrew has created a full panoply of scientific and technical terminology, some of it created with Hebrew morphology and some borrowed. The Academy of the Hebrew Language created and continues to create terms, but of course many come into use bottom-up. For example, for 'preposition' I have heard both /milát jáxas/ 'relationship-word' (the normative term) and /prepozítsja/. For Arabic, on the other hand, my casual impression is that the terminology is less uniform and maybe less pervasively used, because education systems, publishers, and language academies in so many countries don't necessarily collaborate.
Bob Hoberman said,
August 31, 2021 @ 4:04 pm
(Of course 'preposition' is not a new, modern scientific concept, but just an illustration of the processes.)
Andrew Usher said,
August 31, 2021 @ 6:37 pm
George:
I noticed Philip Taylor's use of 'beg the question' also. But I took it as the 'incorrect' use, with the question being the next sentence. I can't see that asking the best way to solve a problem that doesn't actually need solving is a logical begging of the question, or any another logical fallacy – only a practical one.
I, too, would like to see the phrase used it its 'traditional' sense, but that doesn't seem like a correct example.
George said,
September 1, 2021 @ 4:45 am
Andrew Usher
I read it as questioning the logical validity of arguing (albeit not in so many words) that "We must find the best way to solve the problem of the lack of scientific terminology in African languages because the lack of scientific terminology in African languages is a problem". What is being assumed is that there is a problem to solve in the first place.
Philip Taylor said,
September 1, 2021 @ 12:21 pm
George / Andrew — Yes, that is exactly what I meant.
Andrew Usher said,
September 2, 2021 @ 10:44 pm
I think I and George are in agreement about that; the only question between us relates to the use of 'beg the question', which your response does not resolve.
While it's certainly reasonable to infer that the authors believe (or pretend to believe) that the lack of terminology is a problem, that assumption is not related to the conclusion (i.e. proposed solutions) and thus 'begging the question', in its logical sense, doesn't apply. Logic is a limited tool – it helps us answer questions, but it can't tell us what questions to ask.