Scientific jargon in other countries

July 29, 2005 3:10 PM

In America (and in Europe, too, I suppose), we use the Linnaean taxonomic system for living things and have certain specific terms (acetate, polymerase, cholinergic, etc.) that are used in chemistry, for example; how does such terminology work in other languages, especially those very dissimilar to English, such as Chinese?
posted by clockzero to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

Most languages are capable of writing down something that sounds like, phonetically, the other language's word. In the same way that we say Shanghai or Beijing as phonetic representations of words that are, at the end of the day, Chinses ideograms, I'm pretty sure that the Chinese have ideograms that phonetically sound like the scientific terms.

I know, for instance, that Japanese has a subset of characters used for sounding out foreign words. I'm sure someone else out there can flesh this out.
posted by Jimbob at 4:30 PM on July 29, 2005

AFAIK, English.

I'm Chinese and when I ask older relatives about the names of species and such, there doesn't seem to be formalized (nor congruency to Western taxonomic system) classification system. Just names of different animals.

I have an uncle with a physics PhD from HK Technical and technical words tend to be in English.

Can somebody discredit/confirm?
posted by PurplePorpoise at 4:30 PM on July 29, 2005

First off, English has become a lingua franca for many fields, much as Latin used to be, so the odds are that professionals in a given discipline will have picked it up at some point.

But Linnaeus' system and most scientific terminology are far from being English-centric (Linnaeus was Swedish*); the effects of hundreds of years of Greek and Latin as the dialects of educated folk have left their mark, and a huge percentage of scientific terminology has its roots in those languages. For example, you mention 'polymerase'; while I'm unsure of the etymology of the '-ase' suffix, 'polymer' itself is a more or less direct transliteration of the Greek 'πολυμερης' (which means 'many parts'). And many scientific names of species are formed from one or two descriptive Greek or Latin words. Those which aren't tend to be named for people or places.

* His "proper" name was Carl von Linné, but because everything learned in those days was written in Latin, he became Carolus Linnaeus.
posted by ubernostrum at 5:50 PM on July 29, 2005

I'm no biology expert, but Japanese actually has two ways of saying most of these terms. There is the Japanese pronunciation of the original word, and a translation of the meaning into Japanese. They can be used interchangeably in most cases.

Polymerase:
ポリメラーゼ
重合酵素: literally polymerized enzyme


Acetate:
アセテート
酢酸塩: literally acetic acid and salt

Cholinergic is a bit of an exception and is a combination of both types:
コリン作用性: literally 'cholin' acting

The indispensable WWWJDIC has a life science dictionary if you want to poke around.
posted by Alison at 7:25 PM on July 29, 2005

I would guess that the Chinese could use the same Idiograms that the Japanese do for whatever, like Alison pointed out.

The chinese also sometimes use words that sound sort of (but not very much) like the english words. For example, "america" used to be "yi-mei-li-guo" which was shorted to "mei-guo"
posted by delmoi at 9:52 PM on July 29, 2005

His "proper" name was Carl von Linné, but because everything learned in those days was written in Latin, he became Carolus Linnaeus.

You'd think so, but that's actually false. His father's name was Nils Linnaeus and he was born Carl Linnaeus; he took the name von Linné when he was admitted to the aristocracy.
posted by languagehat at 6:21 AM on July 30, 2005 [1 favorite]