ABSTRACT
The relation between language and science has been a matter of inquiry since the very beginning of scientific activity. Since Bacon's critique of words as idols of the marketplace, the issue of proper scientific terminology has been linked with the idea of scientificity as a whole, from ideas of artificial languages to the quest to improve vernaculars. Historically, this discussion intensified at the time vernacular languages began to challenge Latin as the scholarly tongue in the early modern period. The de-Latinization movement of the seventeenth century was seen as abandoning the scholastic manner of understanding the world, linking secular scientific ideas with nationalist ideologies; in the case of nationalistically based linguistic reforms, foreign words were to be expunged, for example traces of French in German. This so-called linguistic purism has not yet found much place in the discussion of how the sciences have developed, although at the time it was an issue scientists were confronted with and which they discussed.
