Is English the language of knowledge by default?

 This was on The Star (20th October 2011) pg 54.

The views of this writer had aroused me to write my perspective of the issue.  In my earlier blog posting, I shared my views about language of commerce. I proposed that the language of the trading partner that have the upper hand in the trading transaction will be the language of commerce (at least in the transactions involving the two parties).

Before I share my views on language of knowledge (for education and intellectual interactions), i would like to reiterate that I do not support or oppose the views of the above writer. I only felt that additional point of views need to be shared so that you could make an informed conclusion on your own. In fact, I could accept the fact that "a scientist from MIT would never understand a physics research paper and mathematical lemmas written in Malay...." especially if that particular scientist do not know any other language besides English.  MIT is in an English speaking country (USA). However, if you go their library, I bet you will find scholarly literature in other languages (especially Latin) and obviously a lot of English translated version of scholarly literature written in other languages. The issue is not what language is used to capture the knowledge but how relevant the knowledge is.

I can understand someone who would only refer to literature written in a specific language, most likely in the language they could understand. But to limit the literature review to only language we understand means to limit our knowledge. Knowledge is first captured in the language it was created. During transfer/sharing process, it will be captured in other languages (translation) so that it could be applied universally. It just so happened that today most scholarly literature is written in English or has been translated to English. However, we cannot deny that there are new knowledge being created and captured in other languages.

Before English, the language of Knowledge was Latin and before that it was Arabic. Why? The language used by scholars is the official language for the center of Knowledge creation (used to be Arabic and then Latin, as it is now English).

As in my last post, I do not want to bored you with History lesson. Look it up and you'll discover your own how Knowledge being translated into Arabic from other languages so that scholars in the Islamic world could study and create new knowledge. History repeats itself for Latin and then English.

I propose that language of Knowledge is the language use to create, transfer/share and apply the knowledge. It can be any Language. What's important is the Knowledge, not the language used to capture, transfer/share and apply the knowledge.  Language is only the tool to communicate the knowledge. And yes, we can use sign language or pictorials to share knowledge.

I believe that no specific language can claim sole rights to be the language of knowledge. To do so is to claim that knowledge cannot be created and written in other languages. To do so is to deny knowledge to people who could not speak that language. To do so is to invalidate all knowledge that had been written in other languages. I can't imagine that since half of science knowledge was created in Arabic, translated to Latin then translated to English. There would be no Mathematics as we know it today since the numeral system we use today originated from Arabic, the other choice we have is Roman, or Chinese....what's an English numeral system anyway?