Re: Polyglot Challenges

A number of years ago I shared an office with a Chinese physisist who was a guest at the university at the time. He was born in Bejing and had his physics education in China.

Obviously the topic of languages came up once in a while (given my interest in linguistics) and he claimed that it was much easier to do physics in English than in Chinese. More generally, his claim was that English is more suitable a language for scientific thinking than Chinese is. Consequently, when considering physics problems, he did this in English in his mind.

Since I don't know any Chinese (or non-Western European language for that matter) I've never been able to grasp what he meant, and hence would be happy to hear comments on this.

Best regards, -gjb-

Comment on Re: Polyglot Challenges

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Re: Re: Polyglot Challenges by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Apr 21, 2003 at 18:09 UTC
I would say this is very likely. I picked up a little Korean a few years back and though it's not directly related to Chinese (Chinese grammar is actually closer to English than Korean/Japanese) it's got the same kind of conceptual/contextual nature; one sentence can mean 10 things, plurals are understood, single-syllable-homonyms galore. I'd say that this is the reason German ruled for so long as the primary language of science (on top of Latin and Greek, of course). The case and grammar structure is harsher than English so perhaps better for expressing complicated ideas. Same sort of relationship for English to Chinese.	[reply]
Re: Re: Polyglot Challenges by IlyaM (Parson) on Apr 22, 2003 at 11:49 UTC
Somewhat related observation: in general Russian have longer words and sentences than English. For this reason I even prefer sometimes to communicate via email/IM in English even if my correspondent knows Russian. Saves some typing :) -- Ilya Martynov, ilya@iponweb.net CTO IPonWEB (UK) Ltd Quality Perl Programming and Unix Support UK managed @ offshore prices - http://www.iponweb.net Personal website - http://martynov.org	[reply]