From Svein Gisle Apeland
Do you have to speak English to do worthwhile science? Or is it merely arrogance, ignorance and/or laziness on the part of English speakers that means results published in other languages are ignored by them?
Govert Schilling, in his article on Maurice Allais’s studies of the behaviour of pendulums during eclipses, reports Thomas Goodey as saying Allais’s big mistake was that he published his results almost exclusively in French (25 December 2004, p 30). French is not a minor language, and it should be possible for English-speaking people to read and understand languages other than their mother tongue. What matters is not which language a paper is in, but what it says.
Haugesund, Norway
