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So raise your kids in Esperanto? Or does it really matter that much in the end?


I thought someone might try that tack. Math is completely decoupled from its representation, so you can use whatever notation you want and not lose anything. I'm not gonna guess to what extent linguistic communication is bound up with its representation, but it's certainly more than math, meaning meaning can be lost. So your analogy doesn't work. Also, since mathematical notation is a tool primarily to facilitate mechanical transformations, and only secondarily for communication, you should use whatever lets you think biggest.


An excellent point as long as you do not need to actually communicate your results to anyone. As soon as you do, it becomes precisely as bound as language is.


So raise your kids in Esperanto?

I hope not.

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

A Nobel laureate in physics who grew up in a non-English-speaking country recommends learning English as a key to physics research.

http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html


The author of that article is well known in the Esperanto world for being the author of that article... and nothing more ;)

A true expert in Esperanto, the linguist and psychologist Claude Piron, debunked that article years ago:

http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/why.htm




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