> It’s a pity we stopped using Latin in favour of scientific pidgin English as universal language in scientific communications
As an ESL speaker and scientific writer: why?
For people fluent in several languages, which of those languages is chosen to communicate makes little difference. I'd argue all (sufficiently mature) languages work equally well for transmitting information to other people fluent in that language.
So choosing the language most people you want to communicate with are fluent in makes sense.
If you favor Latin simply for aesthetic reasons, I recommend choosing a more widespread modern language, that has non-pidgin characteristics. French or German (the latter might require a puritan style guide to go with it) would work well.
Latin does give a significant advantage to Romance-language speakers, and anyway trying to make everyone equally bad at the common language is a bit procrustean. The big disadvantage to the decline of Latin (which is probably mostly something that took place in the eighteenth century) is that it fragmented western Europe's academic writing. So without Latin you can't read Thomas Aquinas or Thomas Hobbes' De cive or John Napier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIwCOevUew in the original; or often at all, as a great deal has never been translated while some translations aren't of the best quality. And even with Latin and English you can't read the enormous amount of important material which has been published in (particularly) French and German, especially up to about WWII.
> When using a language none of us speaks we can truly be equals.
It's the opposite: having a preferred "high language" for science means it's gatekept by people who have the means to learn it. Those people will have the home field advantage, much like it was for much of history.
Plus it's just a bad idea. Firstly, it'll take more time for young students to learn to read a scientific paper. Second, you significanly diminish the pool of thinkers and therefore scientists, you're basically making 99% of the population illiterate. Finally there will always be more people willing to communicate in the "vulgar" language and it's where all new vocabulary will be created, which is why every single high language has pretty much died off except in cerimonial contexts.
English is just the language du jour, before that it was French, German in some fields, Arabic, Latin, Greek, etc.
The argument for sticking with Latin is that it's a relatively unchanging language, and the virtue of that is that it gives you first hand access to historical knowledge in a way most are locked away from today.
If we conduct science in Latin, it gives all scientists first hand access to sources from classical works, a thousand years of papal edicts, the works of Duns Scotus, Isaac Newton and Erasmus; and extended to the future, future scientists will have the same access but access to what we produce today, without having to learn 21st century English or having to rely on 23rd century translations.
> The argument for sticking with Latin is that it's a relatively unchanging language
This is as much of an argument against Latin, given that there's no way to say "transistor" or "x-ray" without falling back on pidgin. Translation is part of the scientific process, insofar as science itself isn't static and can't be expressed throughout the ages with a single vocabulary.
(Besides, why stop there? How can we expect today's scientists to truly grasp Plotinus's the One without mastering Koine Greek?)
Latin has been extended with new concepts before, e.g. Newton didn't write classical latin like Cicero, but a post-renaissance latin with extended vocabulary. Koine greek would be another option, being another dead language, but Latin has the benefit of already having a large heritage of scientific writing.
Carefully extending a dead language does have the strong benefit that you can keep it understandible across time. Even mid 19th century English is noticeably more difficult to read, and that's saying nothing about the 16th century English of Shakespeare.
Here's a microcosm of what a waste this is: Benjamin Jowett has translated the complete works of Plato to English, and they're public domain! Great! Free Plato for everyone! ... except this was written in the 19th century, and they're written in an archaic prose that contemporary readers struggle to read, so everyone who wants to read Plato still has to get a modern translation. We're still translating texts that have been readily accessible for half a milennium. Sure there may have been a new insight or a better phrasing here and there, but primarily it's to get it into a language that is accessible to the contemporary reader.
Sticking with English we're losing access to generational talents of the past because we can no longer understand what they're saying.
> Even mid 19th century English is noticeably more difficult to read, and that's saying nothing about the 16th century English of Shakespeare.
You perceive this because you read modern English; you don’t perceive similar differences in Latin because (I presume) you’re not fluent in Latin. I studied mostly Classical Latin, which yields pretty much the same experience when reading Ecclesiastical or Old Latin as modern English speakers have when reading Shakespearean English.
Or in other words: there are foundational shifts that only become legible once the language itself is legible. The fact that I could retcon “x-ray” into Latin today does not make the version of Latin that Livy spoke uniquely valuable to science.
All in all, I’d give us a better chance of preserving the sum total of human knowledge, including all versions of Latin, in fastidiously translating them into today’s dominant languages. This will be true of English too, whenever English stops being the lingua franca.
Note the latinitas dubia on the first: we can calque anything between languages; that doesn't make Latin uniquely suitable for scientific conversation.
(It also doesn't make it uniquely unsuitable: what makes it unsuitable is the fact that the only people who speak it are the pope, a handful of bishops, and a bunch of dorks.)
As an ESL speaker and scientific writer: why?
For people fluent in several languages, which of those languages is chosen to communicate makes little difference. I'd argue all (sufficiently mature) languages work equally well for transmitting information to other people fluent in that language.
So choosing the language most people you want to communicate with are fluent in makes sense.
If you favor Latin simply for aesthetic reasons, I recommend choosing a more widespread modern language, that has non-pidgin characteristics. French or German (the latter might require a puritan style guide to go with it) would work well.