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Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

cardiff.ac.uk

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Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

#41

Post by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn »

defrost wrote: post #39
6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote: post #35

Owain added new scientific terms to the Welsh dictionary. These include: “damcaniaeth dwysedd ffwythianolion” meaning “density functional theory” “brasamcan graddiant cyffredinol” which means a “general gradient approximation” “dull gwahaniaeth feidriadd” which translates as “finite difference method” Which sort of disproves the hypothesis that 'Welsh Is a Language for Science'.

Not in the slightest. When Isaac Asimov was doing his doctoral thesis in Chemistry the defacto language for reading and understanding any applied | industrial chemistry work was German. The three Welsh examples above appear to the untrained eye just as long, unweildly, and complex as German expressions in chemistry .. the real test is whether they become easier with familiarity and regular use.

My point was not that the additions are unweildly, it was that they were necessary.

Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

#42

Post by mpalfrey »

fdsafdsafds wrote: post #25
kome wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

indeed i was answering TeeMassive’s comment, and not to the main topic. In this case, the goal of writing a PhD in a (all but) dead language, it's to keep it alive, not to be inclusive. i really don't know what's the social makeup of Welsh speakers (if any); but i understand it's a very niche thing, and not really useful for inclusivity of science; but again: it's not something i was arguing. i was talking about "rea…

>i really don't know what's the social makeup of Welsh speakers There's a helpful map here: https://datamap.gov.wales/maps/welsh-language-statistics/ Zooming in on Cardiff shows exactly what I described - Welsh is more common (although still rare) in affluent suburbs, and the central part of town along with the poorer suburban housing developments have the lowest level of Welsh. Outside Cardiff, the effect is essenti…

Good map. As someone who grew up in Cardiff it doesn't surprise me to see this distribution. A lot of media roles are also billingual in Cardiff.

I've got a GCSE in Welsh (having been one of the first years to have to do it mandatory). Used it once in anger up in North Wales. It was a difficult language to learn and I'd have preferred to continue with another European language ideally. I'll probably try to teach my daughter some Welsh though (she was born in England and will go to school in England).

Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

#43

Post by kitd »

jl6 wrote: post #31
MichaelRo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting observation, a language that hasn't evolved (due to lack of demand) to include scientific terms. Speaking zero Welsh I wonder if the choice for "density functional theory" was specifically chosen to sound "Welsh" instead of going for Anglicisation. Take Romanian, the word for "cheese" goes all the way back to Dacians, but there was no "density functional theory" until rather recently so that was borrowed…

> “damcaniaeth dwysedd ffwythianolion” Each of those three words was already a Welsh word - clearly Welsh already has words meaning “density”, “function”, and “theory” - so it seems the innovation is combining them in a new sense rather than making up new words as such.

Indeed, and in a typically Welsh order, which puts the noun "damcaniaeth" (= "theory") first, followed by the adjectives.

I think the innovation is in finding the appropriate Welsh words to represent the concepts involved. I'd imagine that would be easy in many cases, but there may be other scenarios where several words could be used to mean the same concept, and the work is in choosing the most appropriate.

I mean, it happens in software jargon too: most of us have had to name objects Manager/Handler/Executor/Service/etc.

Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

#44

Post by chimprich »

kome wrote: post #16
fdsafdsafds wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, Welsh is not the local language of Cardiff, nor is it for large areas of Wales (judging by % of Welsh speakers).

yes, in this case it's preserving a language that is almost dead, because killed by English internal colonialism/centralism so to say, and preserving a language is also a good endeavor.

Calling a language that is spoken by hundreds of thousands of people "almost dead" is a strange claim. A quick search suggests Welsh is in the top 7% of languages spoken worldwide.

Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

#45

Post by [deleted] »

konschubert wrote: post #37
jmopp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order for a language to be used for science, it has to be made that way. For instance, 150 years ago Afrikaans was considered nothing more than corrupted Dutch. But the Afrikaner nationalists - for all their faults - did put a lot of effort into bringing the language to a similar standard as English: establishing universities, ensuring there was scientific and industrial vocabulary, and so on. They often took the…

Rekenaar is a German word (Rechner) and simply means computer.

[deleted]

Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

#46

Post by carlmr »

thebruce87m wrote: post #23
carlmr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a dirty weekend?

A couple staying away at a hotel. If they already have kids, the kids are definitely not going. It’s a semi common term in the UK and would be used casually among friends and close workmates to indicate a short break with just you and your partner.

Ah that explains it, neither heard it in the US or Canada, but I'm not too well versed in British English.

Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

#47

Post by VK538FY »

joe__f wrote: post #22
VK538FY wrote: post #12

I think that it's great and he's doing a service for his language. Nothing stops him from providing an abstract or translating the thesis in other languages.

If someone had told me while I was writing up that I should translate my thesis into another language I think my brain would have exploded

Really? Just write it in your native language (Welsh in this case) and have someone translate it. For most languages, not a big problem and the uni surely has the resources to do it. Here, the additional effort is the creation of the Welsh words that don't exist and maintaining the list for a Welsh to English translator.

Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

#48

Post by b3orn »

MichaelRo wrote: post #6
Bostonian wrote: post #2

No, it's not. If Owain (the PhD who wrote his thesis in Welsh) wanted to be productive and advance his field, he would want his research to have the largest audience possible. Quoting the article: 'In his thesis, ‘Astudiaeth Gyfrifiadurol o Synthesis a Sefydlogrwydd Defnyddiau Mandyllog Anorganig’, Owain used computational science to see how porous materials could be used for green energy processes and sustainable ch…

Interesting observation, a language that hasn't evolved (due to lack of demand) to include scientific terms. Speaking zero Welsh I wonder if the choice for "density functional theory" was specifically chosen to sound "Welsh" instead of going for Anglicisation. Take Romanian, the word for "cheese" goes all the way back to Dacians, but there was no "density functional theory" until rather recently so that was borrowed…

> "douce-article"

Never seen that, I'm only aware of "logiciel" for software.

Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

#49

Post by donkeybeer »

kome wrote: post #13
TeeMassive wrote: post #11

I get it. I'm a native French Canadian Speaker. My maternal tongue is important to me, to us. But when it comes to science, English is the Lingua Franca of STEM. The giant leaps that humanity has achieved over the past 500 years were made because people on the shoulder of giants; who spoke the lingua franca of the time. Back then Latin, now English.

let me disagree with that; many argues that modern science started with Galileo. The guy knew Latin. But he decided to write in Italian (and not Latin), because he wanted his results to be accessible to "everybody", and useful. I agree that English has reached the Latin status today, but - in the bigger picture - it's just spoken by a cosmopolitan elite, most of the people don't speak it or they don't speak it well.…

Actually that would result in people having to learn multiple languages to understand the scientific literature and make the baseline more "elite", like how mathematical research used to be in french, german and russian two centuries or so ago. Its better theres only at most one extra language to learn (English) than mutiple.

Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

#50

Post by jabradoodle »

kome wrote: post #13
TeeMassive wrote: post #11

I get it. I'm a native French Canadian Speaker. My maternal tongue is important to me, to us. But when it comes to science, English is the Lingua Franca of STEM. The giant leaps that humanity has achieved over the past 500 years were made because people on the shoulder of giants; who spoke the lingua franca of the time. Back then Latin, now English.

let me disagree with that; many argues that modern science started with Galileo. The guy knew Latin. But he decided to write in Italian (and not Latin), because he wanted his results to be accessible to "everybody", and useful. I agree that English has reached the Latin status today, but - in the bigger picture - it's just spoken by a cosmopolitan elite, most of the people don't speak it or they don't speak it well.…

It's exclusive not inclusive, most of the people in Wales don't speak Welsh.
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