[fan]

"English-language conquest is not more efficient than polyglot science – it is just differently inefficient."

This seems to be the main thesis the article is trying to prove, yet there's no real clear analysis of the actual tradeoffs.

The argument that having multiple languages has some vague "multi-cultural" advantage over a single unique language is far from evident. The only real argument I can think of distills down to a sense of inequality that some people have 100% of major science article written in their native tongue (English), and all others have 0%.

The segway into the long history of languages in science seems like a non-sequitur for the article key thesis. But it does bring up a point that seems interesting: if one language is so efficient why did scientists fail to coordinate for so long?