Scientific Languages

Science, you've failed me again. I mean, it is the twenty first century for Christ's sake. Forget the fact that I have a telephone in my pocket that is also a super-computer. Where is my hover board? Why have I not gone on a dinosaur safari in my own time machine! But, while science may have disappointed the nineteen eighties dreams of my youth, scientific languages fascinate me.


When I say "scientific languages," I am referring to an aspect of language that social rather than grammatical. The thought occurred to me while looking over the list of Wikipedias in various languages. Only three languages have more than a million articles: English, French and German.

The internet is one of those scientific achievements that was supposed to level the playing field, to allow for the open exchange of ideas across any boundaries. It is interesting, therefore, how little the big three have moved. French has not lost the encyclopedic cachet it has had since Diderot and d'Alembert. German was the language of science in Russia long before Russian. And English, while perhaps the newcomer, has more articles than the other two combined.

So, what do scientific languages have in common? Vocabulary is an obvious place to start looking.  For one thing, I would think they would all have large numbers of words, but that can be a tough thing to count. Much more interesting to me is that scientific languages seem to share a common pool of terms.  Take a look at some linguistic terms, for example:

English	German	French
accusative	Akkusativ	Accusatif
predicate	Prädikat	prédicat
declension	Deklination	déclinaison

Similar examples could be found in geology, physics, chemistry, etc. Of course most of these terms all come from Latin, which was itself once the mega-scientific language for most of Europe (and whose Vicipaedia is now ranked only #50 with 58,857 articles).

I would also expect to find that scientific languages have a large number of literate users, if not all of them are native speakers (or speakers at all!). They are also prestigious languages, although this is kind of a chicken- and-eggy thing. Do languages become prestigious because they are used for science or are prestigious languages

There are many more questions which remain. What other languages should be included in this category? Arabic? Chinese? Persian? How are scientific languages different (socially or grammatically) from other languages?

And where is my -----ing hover board?