When you get down to the meat of the article, all it has is 1) an anecdote about how some Indonesian tribe has special ways of communicating earthquakes, extrapolated to a claim that "indigenous knowledge has a lot to offer the scientific community." 2) that the dominance of English wasn't the case in the 15th through the 17th centuries, never mind that communication between those science communities in different countries was extremely limited compared today in large part because of LANGUAGE. 3) the dominance of English has led to atrophy of scientific terminology in other languages (does there need to be a Spanish, Chinese word for quark?) 4) it hurts some people's self-esteem because they're not good at English yet.
This is all pretty petty and extremely unconvincing. There is nothing here that even remotely makes the case that English is any sort of a problem for science that wouldn't cause massively bigger problems for science if we went back to a giant hodgepodge of languages that no single scientist could ever hope to learn all of to maintain a competence in their field.
This is all pretty petty and extremely unconvincing. There is nothing here that even remotely makes the case that English is any sort of a problem for science that wouldn't cause massively bigger problems for science if we went back to a giant hodgepodge of languages that no single scientist could ever hope to learn all of to maintain a competence in their field.