Competitive languages would hugely hinder the progress. Consider this: Mendel discovered the field of genetics but Darwin wasn't even aware of his work mostly because it was published in German, so we should be glad that the lingua franca of today is a relatively simple language as English, although I might had preferred Anglish if that was available - https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Main_leaf
Darwin could definitely read German -- there are quotations from German sources in his work that are left untranslated as he expected that any educated scientist would be able to read it. In the case of Mendel, the issue wasn't that it was in German, but it was in a very obscure journal of a local science society.
Whatever the problems of having a lingua franca for science are, the problems of not having one are much worse. Weird that Gordin is the only respondent to even mention this.
That is the obvious advantage that everyone knows, only tangentially related to the issue at hand: the challenges of being forced to work in a non-native language.
It's not at all tangential. It is the core of the problem. Any 'solution' or 'improvement' needs to understand and acknowledge the benefits of monolingualism. Look at Dharwadkar, who is calling for breaking up monolingualism without any consideration of the costs, or Sheridan, who advocates for more handholding by professors (because they have so much free time as it is?), or her example of an Indian professor: if the paper is so badly written that it cannot be understood despite many revisions, then how is it supposed to add to scientific knowledge? (It's not like scientific journals have very high standards for prose as it is, so that paper must have been gibberish at the start.) Consider this quote:
> English speakers have become the gatekeepers of science. By keeping those gates closed, we’re missing out on a lot of perspectives and a lot of good research.
OK, so let's say we switch to having everyone publish in their own native language because gosh we wouldn't want to be gatekeepers. Now instead of one 'gate', we have... hundreds, because everyone has to learn every language or else they are being 'gatekept'. Oops.
This pervasive error, this nirvana fallacy, of praising only the benefits of multi-lingualism, renders the entire discussion moot. It's a tissue of complaints and buzzwords.
We have the ability to learn multiple languages, and to work in them. In the history of science, working in multiple languages is the norm.
The idea that every piece of discourse should be in English is a modern phenomenon. It ironically has arrived just as the automated translation renders the interlinguistic literature gap irrelevant.
People should be talking about forcing English speakers to work in their non native language, not just about the woes of a single common language for science.
It is precisely at this moment that we have the ability to gain from cultural diversity without losing intelligibility. Will we go for this possibly? Probably not....
>People should be talking about forcing English speakers to work in their non native language, not just about the woes of a single common language for science.
There are thousands of languages in use worldwide. If English weren't the modern lingua franca, what would stop people from having these same complaints about any other "universal" language?
> It ironically has arrived just as the automated translation renders the interlinguistic literature gap irrelevant.
>It is precisely at this moment that we have the ability to gain from cultural diversity without losing intelligibility
Modern translators have come a long way, but they're far from able to translate scientific texts into intelligible English, especially without losing meaning, particularly from languages which have vastly different grammatical and conceptual styles, like Chinese, for example.
I think it's just en Vogue right now to complain about the Anglo-Saxon hegemony; these problems are not caused by English per se, and the rate of progress is substantially better with this current standard than the alternative you propose of keeping international research effectively siloed by language.