Maintained by Seed's editors, web editors, and the other people who make Seed tick, Page 3.14 points you in the direction of some of ScienceBlogs' finest offerings, plus the tastiest tidbits of science news and opinion from around the web.
On Monday, our German partner Hubert Burda Media soft-launched ScienceBlogs.de, a new ScienceBlogs site in German. In thinking about science blogs written in other languages, we thought now would be a good time for a quick reader poll.
Below we've got two questions for you, dear readers, about your language skills. It'll only take a few seconds to answer, so please do so. And if you'd like to add more thoughts about ScienceBlogs and language, please comment on the post—we'd love to hear it!
Question Number 2:
Care to explain your reasoning? Comment below!
Education & Careers
Comments
There appears to be a problem with your first poll question. It only allows selection of one language before displaying results. I'm sure that many ScienceBlogs readers are polylingual.
Also, when it comes to science and internet activity, actually speaking a language is probably not relevant. What is more important is what languages people can read. For example, I can speak French, but I can make general sense of scientific articles in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.
I'm also rather surprised that Russian didn't show up in your list, considering how many world scientists use it.
Posted by: chezjake | December 11, 2007 2:06 PM
Hungarian!
Posted by: sbotond | December 11, 2007 2:30 PM
Unless they edited the post after your comment, I don't think there's a problem with the poll. It asks what language you speak best after English and asks you to select that one. I think they intended it to just be a single selection.
Posted by: Eric | December 11, 2007 2:30 PM
I would say Spanish due to the massive audience you can capture with that language.
Posted by: Niobe | December 11, 2007 2:36 PM
Я говорю русского.
Posted by: Deepsix | December 11, 2007 2:48 PM
Ouch. That didn't work. Anyway, put me down for Russian.
Posted by: Deepsix | December 11, 2007 2:49 PM
It'd be better if we could choose multiple languages for the first poll.
Posted by: j | December 11, 2007 2:58 PM
Isn't it obvious that the next one should be in Russian?
Posted by: Tom | December 11, 2007 2:59 PM
Swedish
Posted by: Richard | December 11, 2007 3:01 PM
I'd say Spanish, but Chinese is definitely up and coming. Japanese and French next.
I speak Korean and German, but since English is my native language I prefer reading science in English of course. Though, I am looking forward to honing my German skills with science blogs!
Posted by: Trey | December 11, 2007 3:02 PM
Klingon should be the next SB language.
Posted by: Che | December 11, 2007 3:17 PM
Hebrew! Scienceblogs.co.il please.
Posted by: Sickle Cell | December 11, 2007 3:23 PM
Esperanto and Navajo.
Posted by: Tegumai Bopsulai, FCD | December 11, 2007 3:39 PM
Well, the most spoken languages are Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi, so those seem appropriate.
Posted by: Matthew | December 11, 2007 3:41 PM
Has to be espaol
Posted by: JD | December 11, 2007 3:44 PM
"Unless they edited the post after your comment, I don't think there's a problem with the poll. It asks what language you speak best after English and asks you to select that one. I think they intended it to just be a single selection."
We edited it after the comment...unfortunately, Quimble polls only allow for one answer per question.
Posted by: Katherine Sharpe | December 11, 2007 3:48 PM
Classical Latin and Greek
Posted by: Travis McDermott | December 11, 2007 4:11 PM
I don't speak or read either one, but the last time I checked Brazilian Portuguese and Farsi (aka Persian, Iranian) were the 2nd and 3rd most-written languages on the Internet, after English.
There are a *lot* of Brazilian and Iranian bloggers.
Posted by: HP | December 11, 2007 4:17 PM
Other: Dutch
Though I can live with classical Latin :D
Posted by: Who Cares | December 11, 2007 4:22 PM
Swedish and Spanish
No french though, damn them all.... cheese-eating surrender monkeys...
Posted by: kevin z | December 11, 2007 4:32 PM
I think the Muslim faithful are in desperate need of some science blogging, maybe blogging in Arabic might help.
Posted by: Chris | December 11, 2007 4:46 PM
Latin, if you really want to suck me in.
Posted by: nj | December 11, 2007 4:47 PM
I didn't see an option for the language of Carolus Linnaeus. :-)
Posted by: John | December 11, 2007 4:52 PM
"Well, the most spoken languages are Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi, so those seem appropriate."
What are the most spoken in science and/or on the Internet?
The question of appropriateness is not as simple as looking at a world census. There are a billion Chinese but most don't have internet access. And the number of non-Chinese who speak Chinese is very low. And non-Indians who speak Hindi? Why bother when English is spoken by basically every educated Indian?
I would suggest French or Spanish or Chinese, based on whether the goal is to expand into Africa, South America, or Asia, respectively.
Posted by: RickD | December 11, 2007 4:52 PM
En francais SVP. I think it would make a lot of sense to have some math or philosophy stuff done in french.
English is the galactic basic and everyone speaks it for business, science, and international affairs.
Posted by: Ryan Dickie | December 11, 2007 5:01 PM
I'm tempted to say Welsh...
Posted by: Iorwerth Thomas | December 11, 2007 5:04 PM
I vote for Persian (aka Farsi), even though I know that it is not actively used for scientific correspondences.
Posted by: SoloGen | December 11, 2007 5:15 PM
I think French would have the largest reach, but I am all about Arabic.
Posted by: thadd | December 11, 2007 5:27 PM
Dutch would be my preferred language after English (proper, not American). As a third i would have to go with French.
Posted by: danil | December 11, 2007 5:36 PM
I clicked Spanish as my best language, though actually my Brazilian Portuguese is just as good if not better. I hadn't realized that we'd be limited to one choice. I'm surprised the numbers on the latter are so low, and a bit disappointed since I had to take a year and a half of it as an undergraduate. Ah well.
Posted by: Mike O'Risal | December 11, 2007 5:46 PM
I'd like to see Russian.
Posted by: Mark E. | December 11, 2007 5:49 PM
I support Russian as well
Posted by: Maxim K. | December 11, 2007 5:59 PM
Russian and Swedish would seem to make the most sense. My $0.02 anyway.
Posted by: Evan | December 11, 2007 6:07 PM
sin duda en espa�ol. Y me duele que nadie haya utilizado este idioma a�n. El empiricismo anglosaj�n necesita del sentido tr�gico de la vida espa�ol (aunque decididamente no comparto la afirmaci�n de Unamuno acerca de que inventen ellos...).
Posted by: Pio Baroja | December 11, 2007 6:21 PM
"There appears to be a problem with your first poll question. It only allows selection of one language before displaying results. I'm sure that many ScienceBlogs readers are polylingual."
Sure
I speak and read dutch , french , english and german ...
Selection of one language really is underestimating your readers ...and creates a flawed poll
Posted by: Tsjok45 | December 11, 2007 6:23 PM
Congrats for the German...
Now is the time for some Slavic languages... Russian / Macedonian / Serbo-Croatian maybe?
Posted by: iacovibus | December 11, 2007 6:33 PM
Yiddish!
Posted by: Josh Rosenau | December 11, 2007 7:22 PM
Spanish would be good, since it's soooo spoken everywhere. Portuguese I find it a lil' irrelevant, since most port speaking blogs are about a) irrelevancies; b) literature/opinion; c) more irrelevancies ill-spelled. No good science written in portuguese on the net nowadays.
Posted by: Gabe | December 11, 2007 7:34 PM
I agree with the first comment, regarding the importance of language reading ability. I'm sure I'm not the only SciBlog reader with a disconnect between the language (other than English) I'm better at speaking (Spanish), and the language I'm better at reading (German).
Posted by: Barn Owl | December 11, 2007 7:46 PM
I know French or Spanish is going win out. Both of these languages are prevalent as first or second languages in the Americas.
I'd really like to see an Asiatic language taken up next. Japanese (オレは出来る), Mandarin or possibly Hindi (India and China are both HUUUUUGE markets).
Posted by: zayzayem | December 11, 2007 8:31 PM
"I didn't see an option for the language of Carolus Linnaeus. :-)"
John, not sure too many living people understand medieval Swedish...
Put me down for Japanese as well - I know Swedish better, but need to practice my Japanese.
Posted by: Janne | December 11, 2007 9:11 PM
凄い。Germanic scienceblogs! Of course, while I would love to read scienceblogs in Japanese, expanding into Russian or Mandarin seems like the next step to take.
Posted by: deanbcurtis | December 11, 2007 9:33 PM
Russian
Posted by: n8aly | December 12, 2007 2:22 AM
I speak Swedish and Spanish. Actually a Swedish SB would be really cool. I know of a lot of people who'd jump at the chance of blogging about science in Swedish in a more organized manner, like on SB.
Janne: Medieval!? Maybe you need to practice history more than japanese? Nah... just kidding with you, I get what you mean.
Posted by: Daniel | December 12, 2007 2:23 AM
I would really like to have Scienceblogs in Hebrew.Would be way cool:)
Posted by: AntonGarou | December 12, 2007 2:42 AM
UTF-8, please. I don't want to see my much cherished umlaut borked each time I make the error of using your preview window.
But if you want to stick to ISO-8859, the -1 variant is outdated. Use -15, which contains the €uro symbol.
Posted by: Lassi Hippeläinen | December 12, 2007 3:36 AM
Other languages I read: Danish, and as an extention Swedish and Norwegian. German, though I'm rusty.
I can understand some texts in Dutch, but doubt I would be able to read a science text in it.
I think the next science blogs should be in Spanish, due to the number of people who speaks it. Chinese and Arabic are other good candidates.
Posted by: Kristjan Wager | December 12, 2007 4:24 AM
I would suggest that one backs such decisions with more empirical facts.
For example, a quick google search for the following term and its declinations gives the following results :
1. scientific (english) : 26.1 mill pages
2. scientifique (french) : 3.7 mill pages
3. wissenschaftliche (German) 1.6 mill pages
4. scientifico (spanisch) : 1.4 mill pages
all other languages are far behind
Conclusion, the top 3 languages of science and philosophy are English, French, German (in that order)
I am quite sure that other empirical facts will confirm this ranking.
Posted by: negentropyeater | December 12, 2007 5:39 AM
This expansion into Europe may mean that ScienceBlogs will finally have to follow European rules against misuse of IP addresses in attempts to identify and block commenters. Some ScienceBlogs bloggers have been misusing IP addresses in this way. Rules for protecting Internet identities are especially strong in Germany.
Posted by: Larry Fafarman | December 12, 2007 5:52 AM
Just a thought against Swedish - we've got to them already, and most read and speak pretty good English. Surely a better approach is to pick a language whose users don't speak English. That way you maximise coverage.
As every Englishman who has visited will have worked out, this is a vote for Welsh.
Bob
Posted by: Bob O'H | December 12, 2007 7:10 AM
First, on the poll question:
Why should local blogs necessarily be in the local language? The main problem with scienceblogs, if there is any, is that it mainly operates in American time zones. (Even if some bloggers autoscript post releases to make up for it.) Frequenting from other parts in the world you can meet a sleeping site, an empty comment thread, or a (too) long thread where the busy hours are past.
To fix that inconvenience I would prefer 3 distributed english language sites, north/south american, european/african, and asian/australian. Of course local language blogs, news and ads should be accommodated on these sites. But if there is no english blogs at all it doesn't compensate for the time lags.
Second, on the poll:
Besides that the above alternative wasn't covered (i.e. english preference), the poll was a javascript which may be blocked in browsers, especially as it was a third party site script. And there was no default text giving a warning for this, and no description of which site should be allowed to run the script.
I expected more professionalism from a large site.
Posted by: Torbj�rn Larsson, OM | December 12, 2007 7:18 AM
Well, I understand all your reasoning, but I still pick Potuguese - there really is an active Portuguese language science blogosphere both in Portugal and in Brazil, and Brazil is one of the largest countries in the world and the second largest population in the Americas. Everybody knows how much of the world problems depends on the "scientification" of Brazilian people: the Amazon rain forest is here, besides other extremely important but less well-known ecosystems, we have good technologies on the production of bio-fuels, we have very deep soils with an incredible potential to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide, brazilian agriculture is very intensive and ours is a growing economy. What we don't have but need desperately is effective science education and popularization. And yes, there are many irrelevant pages written in Portuguese but not as many of them about intelligent design as there are in English.
Posted by: Italo M. R. Guedes | December 12, 2007 7:53 AM
Larry Fafarman: "This expansion into Europe may mean that ScienceBlogs will finally have to follow European rules..."
Only if the service is hosted in Europe, which seems unlikely.
"... against misuse of IP addresses in attempts to identify and block commenters. Some ScienceBlogs bloggers have been misusing IP addresses in this way."
That is a perfectly legal way to use an IP address, also here in Europe.
"Rules for protecting Internet identities are especially strong in Germany."
Yes, but they have nothing to do with either IP addresses (which are identities of computers, not persons) or blocking trolls.
Posted by: Lassi Hippelinen | December 12, 2007 8:00 AM
negentropyeater,
"研究" - 'kenkyuu' (Japanese): 128 million pages
Or, if you prefer:
"サイエンス" - 'saiensu' (Japanese): 6.3 million pages
From this exhaustive empirical research I conclude that Japanese is the next one.
Posted by: Janne | December 12, 2007 8:19 AM
Turkish :)
Posted by: Da Vinci | December 12, 2007 9:23 AM
Bob O'H: Good point.
Posted by: Daniel | December 12, 2007 11:06 AM
¡Esperanto!
¿Kial “ScienceBlogs.Com” ne uzas Esperanton? Esperanto estas bela Lingvo. ¡EO.ScienceBlogs.Com bonegas!
¡Esperanto!
Posted by: Walabio | December 12, 2007 11:17 AM
negentropyeater,
Was your post meant in jest? A quick search for 科学, the general word for science in Chinese, brought up 14.8 million hits.
Janne,
研究 is also used in Chinese, with about the same meaning. I restricted the search to Japanese language sites and got about 9.1 million hits. However, 研究 is more general than science. サイエンス gets about 1.3 million hits, though it overlaps with the journal Science, which should probably count anyways. Doing a search for 理学 (rigaku), the more formal word for science, gets 0.7 million hits. This is all using Google, though, and I don't know how good it is for Japanese sites.
Posted by: Shiritai | December 12, 2007 11:18 AM
Meh, got my vocab mixed up. 理学(rigaku) is physical science, 科学 (kagaku) is science. A search for 科学 gets 4 million hits.
Posted by: Shiritai | December 12, 2007 11:27 AM
It's a toss up between Sesotho and Manx.
Posted by: Mephisto | December 12, 2007 12:14 PM
I'm tempted to say Welsh...
Iorweth, dych chi'n siarad yn cymraeg!? Mae cymraeg yn yr iaith y gwyddoniaeth.
Posted by: Mephisto | December 12, 2007 12:19 PM
Spanish would emcompass most of the Western Hemisphere, Spain, parts of Africa, and the Philipines. There are several unversities and high tech areas in South America, and in Spain (the location of one of Europe's largist technical center), despite what RickD thinks.
Brazil also has a huge science and technical population, as noted before there is lots of Internet participation from there, so Portuguese should also be added soon. There are lots of Spanish, Mexican, Chilean, Brazilian and other South American members of the JREF forum
Posted by: HCN | December 12, 2007 12:47 PM
I don't think the size of the scientific population should have a determining factor (aside from the need for authors),
but the amount of scientifically illiterate people(s) that could use a source in their native language, so Spanish/Portuguese for central and south America or French for Africa.
Posted by: Niobe | December 12, 2007 12:57 PM
I vote for a scienceblogs.eu which could include contributors from across the EU (and the rest of Europe) in a variety of languages. I'd like to see British and Irish blogs in English as well as French, German, Spanish blogs etc.
Posted by: Jason | December 12, 2007 2:35 PM
As has been said above, having a Hindi section would be not entirely necessary since English is so spoken in India - indeed, it is a national language with equal status to Hindi. In fact, Hindi is more culturally divisive in parts of India (particularly Tamil Nadu in the south) than English, and anyone in India who doesn't speak English is likely not to speak Hindi either, but one of the 21 other national languages of India.
Maybe the first priority should just be a linguistic science/sociolinguistics scienceblog?
Posted by: Mephisto | December 12, 2007 3:37 PM
It doesn't matter whether Hindi is divisive or English is commonly understood in India (actually a really bad claim - really is it anything beyond wanna, gonna?). Saying that English alone is sufficient cuts out a vast majority in India. I would vote double triple for Hindi - it simply would open ScienceBlogs up for a huge huge population in India.
@Mephisto: Very poor claim based on poor sampling: "anyone in India who doesn't speak English is likely not to speak Hindi either."
Posted by: Gaurav | December 12, 2007 5:00 PM
I would suggest the following:
-French and Russian, due to the fact that both are linguae francae for different parts of the international community;
-Chinese;
-romanized Hindi/Urdu;
-Spanish and Portuguese;
-Japanese;
-Arabic and possibly Farsi
All of the above are based mostly on numbers, and at least in part the amount of literature written in those languages.
Posted by: Brian X | December 12, 2007 5:15 PM
To echo what was said above (and what I've said elsewhere): Please, please, PLEASE change the default template charset to utf-8!
How hard can this be? (Answer: It is not hard at all.)
iso-8859-1 is barely adequate for English. Just look at this comment thread! Ugly and provincial.
Before you even think about starting a new ScienceBlogs site, contact your webmaster and tell him, "Drop what you're doing and make sure that the templates for all future posts default to charset=utf-8." We can continue the language discussion when that's done. Like, in a few minutes.
Posted by: HP | December 12, 2007 6:04 PM
I would love to see Latin, since it is archaic and beautiful, but Spanish or Italian would be more practical.
Posted by: Jason Fox | December 12, 2007 11:09 PM
Hindi.
Posted by: North | December 13, 2007 8:34 AM
How about Turkish, to try and counteract the importation of Answers in Genesis there}
Posted by: Adam Cuerden | December 13, 2007 10:53 AM
Icelandic!!!
Granted, there are only 300 thousand of us, but it would be extremely cool!
Posted by: LegoPanda | December 13, 2007 2:46 PM
Hindi!
Posted by: justapie | December 14, 2007 5:34 AM
negentropyeater, scientifico could be spanish, italian or portuguese. So spanish rates even lower.
But english, german, dutch, and the scandinavian trio are more or less equivalent for reading purposes: I read english, german and swedish best, but I can manage the rest.
We should have at least one language from the latin family (no, not latin!): if you choose spanish, portuguese and italian and rumanian speakers will be able to read it without big problems. French people will pretend they can't.
And then of course chinese and arabic, and a slavic language - russian seems the most natural choice. Not that I can read any of those, unfortunately.
Posted by: prosaica![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://scienceblogs.com/seed/nav-commenters.gif)
|
December 14, 2007 10:41 AM
I support LegoPanda
Icelandic
Posted by: ORK | December 15, 2007 5:15 AM
Russian, even though I don't speak a word of it.
Much interesting research, particularly in the physical sciences and mathematics, is reported in Russian that remains unheard of (or at least not widely heard) in the English speaking world for long afterwards. Scienceblogs.ru accompanied by (volunteer?) translation could help bridge this gap.
Posted by: Stagyar zil Doggo | December 15, 2007 5:08 PM
Ironically all the people that don't speak english can't express an opinion, because they can't read this blog.
May be it could be more useful to seek an answer on other language blogs.
For example, you could use http://barrapunto.com (spanish version of slashdot) for a opinion of spanish readers.
That could be a better non biased research.
Posted by: Relevant | December 16, 2007 12:53 PM
Korean... Portuguese...?!? You must be kidding! Where is Russian? Considering the importance of this culture to the world, omitting it is just ridiculous!
Posted by: Mikhail | December 18, 2007 1:16 PM
To negentropyeater:
Congratulations in your assumptions. You clearly forgot that other languages use other alphabets than latin... Example: the word "scientific" with all its declinations spelled in Russian gives more than 10 million hits on Google, and Google doesn't even properly cover the Russian part of the Internet! :)
Posted by: Mikhail | December 18, 2007 1:20 PM
I'm surprised that not so many people have come out in support for Japanese. There are already a bunch of Japanese science bloggers, there's a huge research base in Japan and there's a great deal of interest in science.
Posted by: kobeboy | December 19, 2007 3:30 AM
I suspect Russian would be a good choice. Swedish and French are great, but the majority of Swedes speak English better than native speakers, and the French...;)
Posted by: Jorg | December 21, 2007 11:15 PM
Please please PLEASE fix the site so it is uniformly UTF-8.
Posted by: blf | December 23, 2007 3:32 AM
Turkish
Posted by: kozmetik | December 23, 2007 2:17 PM
Russian as well
Posted by: geciktirici | December 24, 2007 4:23 AM
I regard Spanish as the next logical step (actually, I had expected it to be the second step after English...) It probably offers the best trade-off in terms of number of speakers and geographical dissemination.
@negentropyeater: good try, but "scientific" in Spanish is "cientfico" or "cientfica" depending on gender (no leading 's' in either case; that'd be Italian).
Posted by: Carlos | December 25, 2007 6:07 AM
Italian. Just because we need it. We speak almost no english, and we're among the most scientific ignorant nation this side of the galaxy...
Marco
Posted by: Marco Ferrari | December 27, 2007 11:45 AM
Well, I'd like to see something like a "scienceblogs.eu" European edition -- without changing the language. We may read English pretty well, but it gets boring having to fast-forward through so many posts about "Bush vetoes stem-cell research", "Ron Paul doesn't believe in evolution", etc.
And getting the "meat" of the posts over to both sides should be doable with minimal work. (So long as people are willing to tag their posts, anyway.)
Posted by: Magnus | December 29, 2007 12:05 AM
I suggest Turkish.
Posted by: zets | January 7, 2008 4:01 PM
I think Russian be a good choice
Posted by: greg | January 9, 2008 6:48 PM