Quote Originally Posted by Chronos View Post
But Latin was the language of science of the time, in part, because it wasn't anyone's common language. This had two benefits: It avoided the political fallout of making one nation's language the language scientists from other nations used, and it marked any word in the language as having a technical meaning, which did not necessarily exactly match the common meaning of any word.
No. It was the language of science because it had been the lingua franca of Europe due to the importance of the church and the Latin rites and it's static form vis a vis the evolving Romance languages. You keep assuming it was deliberately picked and this is where you keep going wrong. It wasn't picked as the language of science. It *was* the common language for *everything*, particularly the language of scholarship and all scholarship as ultimately developed as an offshoot of the Catholic church's involvement in educational systems. And kept being so until superseded by other languages in various fields as centuries wore on. Not because of politics, not because it needed to be indicating technical jargon. But because Latin *was* the common language and remained the common language for higher education which remained a small and insular part of society for a long time, and thus institutional power kept it the science language for a long time. Eventually the national science circles get big enough there is a point where you might not necessarily need to publish in Latin and Latin starts to decline as general publication language. Particularly in new fields like e.g. (industrial) chemistry where most experts might be found within one language group.