There might be a word for it now

February 13, 2019 5:06 PM

But there’s no word for “dinosaur” in Zulu. Nor are there words for “Jurassic,” “fossilization,” or “evolution.”

I found that the Latin and Greek roots of scientific terms translate fairly easily to Zulu, since the languages all have similar grammar. A Latin or Greek word made up of a prefix, root, and suffix will usually map directly to a sentence in Zulu. For example, the Latin word quadruped translates to Zulu as Ukuba mlenze mine (“to be legs of four”).

I encountered trouble, however, with the word dinosaur, which comes from the Greek for “terrifying lizard.” The term is a misnomer: Many dinosaurs bear little resemblance to lizards, and some ancient animals that looked like terrifying lizards, such as the dimetrodon, are actually more closely related to mammals than to dinosaurs. I didn’t want to introduce into Zulu the same misconceptions that already plagued so many English speakers.

posted by clew (13 comments total)

Huh. I didn't expect to be at all sympathetic to this, but the author made a pretty good case for avoiding foreign-language terms in their isiZulu science writing. But really, translating "planet" as "wanderer"? That term comes from a misconceived geocentric distinction between "fixed stars" and "wandering stars". Resurrecting mistakes like that doesn't help anyone. Sometimes you can take etymology too far.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:38 PM on February 13, 2019 [2 favorites]

A few weeks ago I was in Cape Town, and was watching some TV news commentators talking about the University of Pretoria was getting rid of Afrikaans. It left me wondering what makes a "vernacular language", and what makes a language suitable for instruction at a major university. It sounds like Zulu is on its way from one to the other.

[TV in South Africa is fascinating. So many languages, so many accents, so much code switching.]
posted by afiler at 6:37 PM on February 13, 2019 [3 favorites]

Resurrecting mistakes like that doesn't help anyone. Sometimes you can take etymology too far.

Reminds me a lot of Uncleftish Beholding - mainly because as they quip at the end, the ἄτομος had been clefted by then.
posted by sukeban at 10:48 PM on February 13, 2019 [3 favorites]

The fact that so many English science words are themselves still taken from Greek as handed down by the Roman Empire and its successors perhaps goes to show how hard-wearing the linguistic legacy of colonisation can be.
posted by Segundus at 11:03 PM on February 13, 2019

As opposed to modern English language imperialism, which is why you call a mobile phone "Handy" in German and the Académie française is fighting a losing batte against anglicisms.
posted by sukeban at 11:29 PM on February 13, 2019 [2 favorites]

(The main period of linguistic colonialism in the English language was the Norman invasion -- most non-French-Latinate words in English like "dinosaur" were invented in the Early Modern period or later. The only words actually dating back to the Roman invasion are a few dozen words like cup (cuppa), wall (vallum) or wine (vinum).)
posted by sukeban at 11:35 PM on February 13, 2019

This essay is fucking cool!!! It gives me so much to think about when it comes to the way I communicate science with the communities around where I work. I've never given a formal presentation in the villages where I work in Cote d'Ivoire, but I did get to give my first presentation in Indonesian on this trip and it was such an interesting challenge to think kind of orthogonally about explaining concepts like life history without just Google translating individual words.
posted by ChuraChura at 4:09 AM on February 14, 2019 [5 favorites]

The distinction between fixed and wandering is so central to astronomy, navigation, and cosmology. Preserving that history should be the goal of projects like this. Also, there's less of a real distinction between planets and stars than our vocabulary implies.
posted by LarsC at 7:17 AM on February 14, 2019 [4 favorites]

This is SUCH a good piece. As a monolingual English speaker who is also a scientist, this has given me a new perspective about my immense privilege. Also, even more mad respect for multilingual folks, especially science writers like Sibusiso Biyela who are doing this kind of work.
posted by lucy.jakobs at 9:59 AM on February 14, 2019 [2 favorites]

For the last century or so language has been the primary locus of decolonization in Iceland. Every non-Icelandic term gets an Icelandic neologism, sometimes several, but they don't always stick. For example, while radio became "útvarp", video has never had a word that covers all instances, so the term is simply "vídjó". The Icelandic science community puts a lot of effort into coming up with Icelandic terms for everything. It definitely makes talking about science easier and more immediate for Icelanders. It makes me happy to read about similar projects in other languages.
posted by Kattullus at 2:40 PM on February 14, 2019 [3 favorites]

Kattulus, there's a similar effort in Israel, but there's IIRC there's recently been more push-back against requiring the use of Hebrew in doctoral programs. There are good arguments on both sides, of course: you want your studies to be part of the international mainstream, but on the other hand you don't want to open the door to further intellectual colonisation.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:53 PM on February 14, 2019 [2 favorites]

It's interesting coming at this as a translator of Mandarin into English. Aside from the linguistic differences, of which there are plenty, Chinese and English are two languages which arrived at the status of self-assured languages that don't think much about colonization through two very different paths. English as the language of colonization and science by historical colonization and modern consensus, Mandarin as the flagship tongue of the most populous country on earth & its gaggle of diasporas, the One Chinese to Rule Them All. Nevertheless, Mandarin (and all other varieties of Chinese) absolutely were colonized by Western terms, and what you might call "internal language colonization" of lesser-spoken varieties by Mandarin continues today, and is a very contentiously debated issue in the mainland's dialect regions, Taiwan, Hong Kong/Macao, and Chinese populations in other countries.

Mandarin often struggles with science terms, and so far has yet to coin any science/modernity terms that have stuck in the Anglosphere, but it's very quick to invent its own equivalents to new terms in English (due in no small part to the structural differences given by characters, but also because of an entirely indigenous, century-plus long cultural effort to "modernize" the language (they wrote in classical Chinese despite not speaking it for 2,000 years and got f**king sick of it well before the 20th-century global wakeup to language colonization), as well as the lightning-speed revolving door that is Mandarin slang, and the bajillion dialects it claims to serve as lingua franca between). Meanwhile, Chinese also has a massive corpus of indigenous philosophy, cultural, religious, and, yes, science terms that English, despite its speakers' pride in it being a borrowing language, paradoxically chokes on. There are so few examples of Chinese terms rendered well or used in English that you have to wonder what's going on. English can ingest and deploy terms from Russian, French, Spanish, Tamil, and Hawaiian without too much awkwardness, so...???
posted by saysthis at 8:10 PM on February 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

saysthis, I'd say "brainwashing" as a calque of 洗脑 was the biggest loanword from Chinese in the second half of the 20th C, but I'd expect anyone who's been on the internet for a few years and is interested in technology and internet culture to recognise shanzhai (even if it's a dated phenomenon by now) and slang like niubi, grass mud horse, river crabs and so on.

What I would expect is that, as India and South East Asia have an enormous population of ESL/ EFL speakers unfettered by state firewalls, we will see more influence from Asian languages in the middle run.
posted by sukeban at 10:30 PM on February 14, 2019