Linguistic Limitations

Someone in my earshot remarked, not many weeks ago, that surely some languages are better than others because they can express more advanced ideas, like those in modern science. More limited languages, the speaker contended, would hamper intellectual progress. As an off-the-cuff example, he asked, ?What could Eskimos say about waves on the ocean??

Notwithstanding the ocean voyages that afford many Inuit with an understanding of ocean waves, the speaker made a more general mistake: he assumed that languages cannot develop along with the cultures that speak them.

We actually have many, many examples of language keeping up with intellectual progress. Among these are English words for recent technology:

• Printer: previously a person who operated a printing press. The new technology would seem to replace the press, but we name it after the person.
• Mouse: presumably references the shape, hinting at how little is essential to our abstract concept of mice ? not even legs, nose, whiskers.
• Computer: previously a person who performed calculations.

We have some words borrowed from other languages, mostly Latin and Greek. Some of them are surprisingly literal, for those in the know:

• Flexor digitorum profundum: the ?deep finger-bender? muscle lies deep in the arm and bends the fingers.
• Bathythermograph: it measures both depth (bathys) and temperature (thermos).
• Antiperistasis: mutual repulsion, being against (anti) staying (stasis) around (peri).

If you?re not in the know, some of those words reduce students to endless nights of rote learning. And if you are in the know, some of them can be misleading:

• Tribology: the study of friction, not tribes.
• Sagittal: left-right division, not arrow-shaped.

Some have deeper, philosophical overtones:

• Universe: the one thing that changes, implicitly suggesting a contrast to that which remains constant. Recently supplemented by ?multiverse?, and the less widely known ?metaverse?, ?xenoverse?, ?hyperverse?, ?omniverse?.

Some of those underlying meanings have been overturned, so the word and its etymology have become unfortunately ironic:

• Atom, from atomos, the unsplittable. And yet it splits.

And some are just nonsense:

By far the most interesting, I think, are the words that we borrow or develop when learning from other cultures. The translation of Greek learning offers us translation in two senses: typically people think either of the knowledge moving from culture to culture, or else of the words changing as the knowledge moves. Relatively few think about how those two kinds of translation are related.

When Greek learning moved to Syriac, then to Arabic, it was moving to cultures for whom both the concepts and the words were absent. The same happened when it moved from Arabic to Latin. Translators had to grasp the concepts while coining new words for them, so the new words are not just mechanical transliterations of their precursors: at each step, the meaning evolves, as translators try to make sense of someone else?s work through their own eyes, looking through their own experiences and context, and often updating things to account for new discoveries since the ?original? text was written. There were several ways to do this. A translator could mimic the sounds, coining a loan-word. Hence the Greek ????????? (?philosophia?) became ?falsafa? in Arabic, ?philosophia? in Latin, ?philosophy? in English. A translator could make a metaphor, as for the present-day technology terms listed above. A translator could look at the component roots of the word in the source language, and coin a similarly structured word using roots in the target language ? more on this in a moment.

Meanings evolved enough that, in the later middle ages, Latin-speaking scholars tried to go back to the ?original? Greek. And then again in the Renaissance. From time to time, it still happens now. There is a lot of Aristotle, for example, interpreted in thrall to the interpretations developed in the thirteenth century. That leaves scope to dig deeper, just as those thirteenth-century scholars were doing, though the chances of making a scientific breakthrough this way are rapidly diminishing.

That translation story is told fairly well in the history of science; it?s a mainstay of the ?Greek heritage? narrative that plays such a strong role in Western cultural identity.

The actuality is a tad more complicated: there was interaction also further east, and perhaps further south. One especially interesting exchange, which returns us to our opening topic, was the translation of seventeenth century astronomy from Europe to China, and the translation of cultural, botanical, geographic and other observations to Europe.

The telescope was one of the many things to crossed the globe in those days. The first Chinese book about telescopes appeared in 1626. It was written by Adam Schall von Bell who, applying his knowledge of classical Chinese, coined the term, ?yuanjing? (??). This term is fairly literal, much like ?flexor digitorum profundum? above: ?yuan? (?) means ?long-distance?, and ?jing? (?) is a mirror, here as a synecdoche for optical device more generally. Its roots parallel the Greek tele+skopos, long-distance+seeing. But there is a difference in nuance: the Chinese term emphasizes the material instrument, whereas the Greek term (and hence the English term) lean more toward its function.

The microscope came along only decades after the telescope. English simply swapped the ?tele? for ?micro?. Chinese made a similar switch: ?xianweijing? (???), which contains the same ?jing?, and the ?xianwei? is ?revealing small things?. This time, the Chinese emphasizes the device?s function, whereas the Greco-English emphasizes what the device looks at.

Unsurprisingly, Chinese has continued to evolve new technical vocabulary. The word for ?electron? also differs in nuance from the Greek-rooted term. Whereas the Greek refers to amber, a material that natural philosophers used for producing static electricity, the Chinese ?dianzi? (??) is an electrical particle expressed in connection with lightning. But, most people tend not to think very much about word roots: just as anglophones don?t always think about amber when they say ?electron?, Chinese don?t always think about lightning either. (Incidentally, the Chinese term for telephone is dianhua, ?electric-speaking?, in contrast to the Greek-rooted ?long-distance speaking?. Only one of these evokes telephones made with string and tin cans.)

Just as combining ?electron? and ?microscope? gives ?electron microscope? in English, the same combination occurs in Chinese. Curiously, this was once upheld as an example for why China would never make much technological or scientific progress. A long-time friend and teacher once pointed me to a book called Loom of Language, in which the author, Frederick Bodmer claims that a Chinese person cannot talk about electron microscopes without explaining at length, every single time, that it?s a system of optical devices (like mirrors) for making small things visible. Clearly, Bodmer surmised, Chinese was not appropriate for advanced scientific thought.

Bodmer omitted to mention that it took only five syllables to say all that, and that those five syllables say almost exactly what we already say in anglicized Greek. For the Chinese speaker, moreover, the literal meaning is fairly self-evident, whereas for the typical anglophone to whom ?electron microscope? might as well be Greek.

But we need not speculate: the century since Bodmer made that claim speaks for itself.

Lest this post seem an pointlessly abstract lark, let us consider what it?s like for students today. On hearing a new term for a new concept, we are in a culture about to share in what a neighboring culture has to offer. We hear the word, but we cannot simply add it to our vocabularies: we need to form meaning, to connect it to what we already know, to have that new word make sense. Only few of us can pick the word apart etymologically, knowing that ?borealis? once referred to the cold north wind, that an initial ?a-? on a Greek word often means ?not?, that the initial ?al-? of words like ?alcohol? is typically an article in Arabic (though the ?cohol? seems to come from something non-alcoholic that, in English, became ?kohl?).

We also have pre-existing, and different, experiences to filter the new meanings through. What?s an oak or maple? Many people don?t have much eye for the differences. I know plenty of people who are tend to see the similarities ? trunk, bark, spiky leaves ? than the differences, except perhaps when they set seed. (Though mention that the ?semen? ? seed ? of one is a ?glans? ? acorn ? and their attention drifts to anatomy. Why the seed of the other is called a ?samara? remains a mystery to me.)

Many difficult cases, in my experience, are in relatively plain English. Words like ?force? cause problems for new students today, and they?ve caused similarly conceptual problems for centuries. It took centuries for us to work out what ?force? ought to mean, prising ourselves away from the intuitive senses that we draw from experience. No wonder that many students today continue to find it tricky. ?Human error? is another that I was confronting only last week in a conversation with people who teach technical writing: in lab reports, it?s almost a guarantee that the writer is methodically doing his best to enumerate all error sources, not knowing which ones matter. If ?human error? appears in one sentence, there?s usually another sentence not far away that raises a shield of nihilism: because our apparatus was not divinely created and because we lack divine omniscience, we can never guarantee our results!

What?s really going wrong here? Not the word, but the meaning.

And what does this mean for science teaching? Maybe it would be useful sometimes to think of it as a process of translation.

Alistair Kwan

Alistair Kwan received his PhD in history of science and medicine at Yale. In earlier days, he worked as an experimental physicist, and now combines both scientific and humanistic approaches in his work. He teaches at the University of Rochester.

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