Re: Planet of the New Papers

["Jerry D. Harris" <jharris@dixie.edu>]

   I'm a bit dismayed at some of the voices resounding on the list 
intimating some inherent superiority of English over any other language. 
English has global prevalence, as a historical hiccup, only because of the 
economic powers that Britain and the U.S. have enjoyed over the last couple 
of centuries; prior to that, one could just as easily have argued that 
Spanish, for example, and Chinese earlier than that, were most globally 
prevelant due to economic (and, let's face it, military) power.  The U.S.'s 
power is waning, and that of the E.U. is rising; who knows, in another few 
decades, we could be arguing about whether French, German, or Spanish should 
be the universal communication language.

   More than that, it's fairly widely recognized that English is one of the 
hardest languages on Earth to master for non-native speakers; certainly, 
it's so riddled with bizarre exceptions to rules in grammar and spelling 
that mastery evades even _native_ speakers -- I can't tell you how many 
papers I've reviewed or edited that demonstrate that native authors don't 
understand when to use "its" or "it's," or "that" vs. "which," to name just 
a couple of examples.  If you've ever made those errors yourself, then I'm 
not sure you have any business complaining that people are still using 
_other_ languages.  Believe you me, after you've had to grade papers where 
students actually use text-message-speak in their answers, you'll realize 
how poorly the natives grasp their own language.

   I have absolutely no sense of how foreign languages are perceived 
outside the U.S., but it does seem to me that Americans are singularly 
adverse to learning foreign languages; doing so seems to be much more "par 
for the course" elsewhere (at least in Europe and South America) -- hence 
the old joke "What do you call a person who speaks three languages? 
Trilingual.  What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. 
What do you call a person who speaks only one language? American."  Now, I 
personally seem to be missing whatever key brain lobes are required for easy 
assimilation of other languages; my sister, however, picks them up very 
easily.  Nevertheless, I have some vague sort of passability with French, 
and I can (slowly) read geoscience papers in Spanish (though not speak it, 
or probably pick it up if spoken), and I have spent ungodly quantities of 
time poring over Chinese papers with dictionaries to try and extract tiny 
tidbits of information...and yes, I have lamented openly that I wish they'd 
publish in English, but I also openly admit that that's a personal conceit, 
not some belief that somehow, mysteriously, English is inherently superior 
to any other language...it's just me projecting my frustration at not having 
learned the language in question myself.  I'd love to learn, say, Chinese; 
unfortunately, no one teaches it 'round here, and it wasn't offered in my 
high school.  (For that matter, in high school I wasn't certain I'd be going 
in to paleontology, so even if they _had_ offered it, I wouldn't have had 
any way of knowing that it would benefit me greatly later on!)  But believe 
me, if an opportunity to learn Chinese comes along, I'm taking it.

    Believe me, I share in your frustration about not being able to 
comprehend information presented in a paper in a non-English language, but 
rather than whinily constructing houses of cards, let's just be honest and 
admit that the fault is _ours_ for not having learned those other languages, 
shall we?  It's _our_ education system (in the U.S., at any rate) that 
doesn't make foreign languages a priority, and that's largely in response to 
the public's lack of perception of how widely valuable that education would 
be.  And maybe it _wouldn't_ necessarily be all that valuable to most 
people, but there's no real system in place to honestly advise prospective 
science students about what languages would be most valuable for them to 
learn in their particular field...high schoolers going into paleo reading 
this would be quite smart to give themselves an advantage by starting in on 
a foreign language _now_ (Mandarin Chinese, German, Spanish, Russian, 
French, and Portuguese -- in roughly that order -- seem to be the most 
common non-English languages encountered in paleo papers -- OK, at least 
dinosaur papers -- though of course Japanese, Romanian, and even Arabic and 
Hebrew pop up now and again).

   We're light years away from a common global language, if such is ever 
achieved; even if one arises, I seriously doubt it'll be English, or at 
least the English we currently recognize.  More likely it'll be some pidgin 
involving English, Chinese, and Spanish -- like the one in "Blade Runner." 
Too bad Esperanto never caught on...  8-P

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jerry D. Harris
Director of Paleontology
Dixie State College
Science Building
225 South 700 East
St. George, UT  84770   USA
Phone: (435) 652-7758
Fax: (435) 656-4022
E-mail: jharris@dixie.edu
and     dinogami@gmail.com
http://cactus.dixie.edu/jharris/

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