"The Development of Scientific English" by David
Graddol
Summarized by Stuart Schleuse
English has become the main language for reporting scientific
discoveries and research throughout the world. Graddol attempts to shed some light onto the process of how this happened. Beginning with Copernicus' theories of celestial movement, Graddo
l details how the philosophical threat to the Catholic church led to the banning of reporting scientific theories in Italy. Possibly because of the puritan government in England, with its encouragement of independent thought, the Copernican ideas took qui
ck root with English scientists, including John Wallis and John Wilkins who went on to found the Royal Society 1660 in order to promote empirical scientific research. Similar societies appeared in all the major countries in Europe, using Latin as the lang
uage of science for scientists, but for popular science, each used its own national language. English needed to develop further to become better suited to scientific discourse. Graddol shows how English acquired the necessary technical vocabulary be borro
wing directly from Latin, translating word elements from Latin (creating a calque), creating new English words, or adopting and modifying existing words. The most common of these techniques was the simple adoption of the Latin term and adapting it to Engl
ish morphology. Not only Latin terms were adopted into English, but terms from ancient Greek and from Muslim science as well. But the problem was more than simple lack of vocabulary. Graddol discusses the work of Halliday, who show how English lacked cert
ain grammatical nuances to allow for objectification of the natural world. Further adaptation of the language and specialization of how verbs and nouns are used to varying effects allowed for this objectivity, according to Halliday, who also points out so
me of the drawbacks to this kind of "thinginess" expressed in scientific language, including a tendency to make the world too static for modern science. Graddol closes with a brief mention of the direction Scientific English is going and quotes Halliday p
redicting that eventually scientific English will become less static and more like spoken discourse with clauses in place of expanded noun phrases.