MOKSLO KALBOS KULTŪROS IR TERMINOLOGIJOS PROBLEMOS

LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI, XXIV(1985)

ANDREJS BANKAVS

ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF LATVIAN LINGUISTIC TERMINOLOGY

The intensive development of linguistics, especially over the past 20–30 years, has led to an enormous increase in the number of linguistic terms. New schools and movements have emerged, new related fields of linguistics have formed (biolinguistics, psycholinguistics, etc.), and new aspects of language study have been revealed.

The vast number of new terms has made communication difficult among linguists not only of different generations but also of different schools of thought. This, in turn, creates certain difficulties in teaching linguistic disciplines to students in Romance and Germanic language departments, a problem that is particularly evident when analyzing original texts on linguistic issues. In this situation, it is extremely important to draw on the linguistic terminology of the native language and compare it with that of the text, since students understand the subject much more deeply and fully when the text is analyzed comparatively, that is, in comparison with their native language.

The volume of translated linguistic literature is gradually increasing, especially in Russian. Russian is currently the principal intermediary language through which the vocabularies of other languages of the peoples of the USSR are expanded, including with linguistic terms.

The emergence of a large number of new terms, coined either in the works of domestic linguists or through the translation of works by foreign linguists, often led to: 1) the replacement of established terms with newer, more “fashionable” ones; 2) an increase in individual authors’ terminological coinages.

Among foreign linguists who coined a particularly large number of linguistic neologisms, one may mention authors such as J. Damourette and É. Pichon, whose works, although written at a high theoretical level and containing much new information, are difficult to access because of their extremely complex terminology. Other linguists who also introduced many linguistic neologisms include L. Tesnière, L. Bloomfield, L. Hjelmslev, É. Benveniste, and others. L. Hjelmslev, for example,

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believed that “terminology is a matter of taste”¹. Yet language is the most important means of human communication, and when a text contains many new terms, it becomes difficult to understand and ultimately fails to gain wide circulation among readers. This is what happened with the terminology proposed by L. Hjelmslev (of 106 terms, only 5% became generally accepted).

When new coinages are translated, they are most often transliterated, which leads to the increasing internationalization of terminology. Although only in the works of É. Benveniste can one encounter such terms as delocutive verbs, delocutives, merismatic level, merisms, syntax and others, after his book “General Linguistics” was translated into Russian² these authorial coinages also came into use among Soviet linguists. Among Soviet linguists whose works popularize foreign-language linguistic terms, one may note Professor V. G. Gak. He is the author of numerous textbooks, monographs, and articles on French, and the terminology used in them is gradually finding its way into the speech of students of Romance languages in Latvia, who introduce into Latvian such lexicological terms as harakси “hapaxes,” kentaurvārdi “centaur words,” ksēnismi “xenisms,” and others, which have not yet been recorded in dictionaries of linguistic terms.

Specialized dictionaries play an important role in the systematization, unification, and normalization of linguistic terms. Since the early 1960s, an increasing number of dictionaries of linguistic terms of various types have appeared abroad and in the USSR (specialized encyclopedic, general encyclopedic, general explanatory, specialized explanatory dictionaries, glossaries, etc.). In the period from 1960 to 1975 alone, 55 different dictionaries of linguistic terminology were published abroad³. During this period, a number of dictionaries of linguistic terms were also published in the USSR; among them, first and foremost, one must mention O. S. Akhmanova’s dictionary⁴—a work consistently used in scholarly research by every linguist. In recent years, other linguistic dictionaries have also appeared⁵. They supplement existing information, clarify and systematize terms, and record new terminology.

¹ См. Mounin G. Dictionnaire de la linguistique.— Paris, 1974, pp. XV—XVI.

² Бенвенист Э. Общая лингвистика.— М.: Прогресс, 1974.—447 с.

³ См.: Слюсарева Н. А., Макарова Г. Н. Обзор современных зарубежных словарей лингвистических терминов (1960—1977 гг.).—В кн.: Актуальные проблемы учебной лексикографии. М.: Русский язык, 1977, с. 287.

⁴ Ахманова О. С. Словарь лингвистических терминов. 2-е изд.— М.: Сов. энциклопедия, 1969.— 606 с.

⁵ См., напр.: Никитина С. Е. Тезаурус по теоретической и прикладной лингвистике (Автоматическая обработка текста).—М.: Наука, 1978.—375 с.; Словарь славянской лингвистической терминологии.—Praha, 1977—1979, т. 1—2; Kleines Wörterbuch sprachwissenschaftlicher Termini.—2, durchgesehene Auflage,—Leipzig, 1978.—306 S.

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Alongside linguists’ practical work on compiling dictionaries of linguistic terms, numerous theoretical studies devoted to questions of terminology have appeared in recent decades. Although the intense interest in terminological issues across various branches of science has taken the form of systematic, everyday scholarly work, linguistic terminology itself has rarely been the object of specific studies, despite its rapid development and its need for theoretical description and practical recommendations. This situation applies fully to Latvian linguistic literature as well.

The development of linguistic disciplines and, consequently, of the corresponding terminology is closely connected with the development of Latvian lexicographic practice, including the compilation of linguistic dictionaries. Since at the beginning of this century the phonetic level had been studied more thoroughly than other language levels (primarily thanks to the work of A. Ābele and J. Endzelīns), this could not fail to be reflected in the terminology. In the first, far from complete, dictionary of scientific terminology⁶, published in 1922, phonetic terms predominate in the “Linguistics” section (55 of the 59 terms, or 93%, relate to phonetics).

Thanks to successful work on collecting and analyzing linguistic terminology, which began immediately after the Second World War, lists of linguistic terms were published as early as 1956, and in 1963 the Terminology Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the Latvian SSR published one of the first national dictionaries of linguistic terminology in the USSR⁷. This bilingual dictionary contains 2,945 terms covering not only phonetics but also the grammar and lexicology of the Latvian language. The broad development of Latvian linguistic terminology was fostered by the publication of academician J. Endzelīns’s monographic studies, the two-volume Grammar of Modern Latvian (1959–1962), materials from the discussion of grammatical terms (1951), and various textbooks and scholarly articles in which existing terminology was used consistently and new terminology introduced.

Twenty years have passed since the publication of the dictionary of linguistic terms of the Latvian language, which played a considerable role in standardizing this part of the specialized vocabulary. Throughout these years, linguists continued their work on creating new terms. Particularly many terms emerged, and continue to emerge, in fields such as lexicology and semasiology—that is, disciplines currently being developed most intensively. However, the collection and standardization of terms in Latvian lexicography are carried out irregularly, which leads

⁶ Zinātniskās terminoloģijas vārdnīca.— Rīgā, 1922.

⁷ Словарь лингвистических терминов.— Рига, 1963.— 256 с.

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frequently to different interpretations of one and the same term; for example, gallicism denotes “a word or turn of phrase peculiar to the French language”; “a word or phrase of French origin”; or only those words of French origin that are classified as barbarisms in the recipient language.

Linguistic terminology constitutes a system made up of heterogeneous units; therefore, the classification of the metalanguage of linguistics should probably be based on several principles. Taking into account the experience of Soviet and foreign linguists in compiling different types of dictionaries of linguistic terms, as well as theoretical research on these issues, it seems appropriate to classify linguistic terms from the following perspectives: 1) the degree to which their cognitive content is generally accepted and stable; 2) the structure of the science of language; 3) the sources from which the terminological vocabulary is replenished.

1. In terms of the general acceptance and stability of their cognitive content, terms may express the recording of a result of cognition (e.g., fonēma “phoneme,” leksēma “lexeme,” sēma “seme,” semēma “sememe,” etc.) or serve as epistemological instruments of discovery (e.g., leksa “lex,” semantēma “semanteme”).

2. In terms of the structure of the science of language, linguistic terms may be classified as terms of a general linguistic nature (e.g., runa “speech,” valoda “language”) or as structural terminology (a group comprising terms that describe language as a systemic-structural formation). Within this group, a thematic division of terminology is emerging that corresponds to the identification of language levels: — phonetic and phonological terminology (e.g., akomodācija “accommodation,” fonēta “phoneme,” patskanis “vowel,” skaņa “sound,” etc.);

— morphological terminology (e.g., adjektīvs “adjective,” morfēma “morpheme,” palīg vārds “function word,” papildinātājs “object,” etc.);

— lexical terminology (e.g., arhaisms “archaism,” neoloģisms “neologism,” polisēmija “polysemy,” etc.);

— syntactic terminology (e.g., bez kopas teikums “subjectless sentence,” divkopu teikums “two-member sentence,” predikatīvatāte “predicativity,” etc.).

Special terms used by particular movements and schools are also associated with this group (e.g., terms used by glossematics: glosēma “glosseme,” grafēma “grapheme,” kinēma “kineme,” plerēma “plereme,” etc.).

3. In terms of their sources of replenishment, Latvian linguistic terms are divided into those that use native lexical items (such as celms “stem,” lauks “field,” mija “alternation,” pēdiņas “quotation marks,” sadura “juncture,” sakne “root,” etc.) and borrowed lexical items:

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a) from living languages, e.g., German (kols “colon,” komats “comma,” stilistika “stylistics,” etc.); Russian (rusists “Russian-language specialist,” slāvists “Slavist,” sovetisms “Sovietism,” etc.); French (argo “argot,” kalka “calque,” replika “rejoinder,” žargons “jargon,” etc.); English (slengs “slang,” etc.);

b) from classical languages, e.g., Greek (alfabēts “alphabet,” sinekdoha “synecdoche,” etc.); Latin (gēnītīvus “genitive case,” nominātīvus “nominative case,” verbs “verb,” etc.).

Among borrowings, a special group must be distinguished: so-called translator words. Following R. L. Kovalevsky⁸, translation is understood as the international dissemination of concepts and their automatic realization in each individual language using borrowed word-formation means according to international word-formation models. Genetically, these words are not words of any European language, since the corresponding concepts were absent from those languages. For example, Greek had no such concepts as lexicology, semantics, semasiology, semiotics, and others. They were created solely on the basis of Greek words. Establishing the common stock of international linguistic terms and clarifying the source language and intermediary languages would be of great significance for linguistics: this would make it possible to trace linguistic contacts and the processes of borrowing linguistic terms more clearly. For example, the term stylistics was first proposed by the German linguist P. Novalis in the mid-XIX century. In Latvian, as J. Rozenbergs showed, this word first occurs in 1890. In French, the word stylistique has existed as a linguistic concept only since 1902, and therefore it would be wrong to consider that this word entered Latvian from French⁹. Thus, a comparison of linguistic terminology could be of some scholarly interest for the history of linguistics.

We have considered only some issues related to the general development of Latvian linguistic terminology. The rapidly developing field of knowledge increasingly demands more complete registration and explication of terms, which, in turn, contributes to the stabilization and coordination of terminological units.

⁸ Ковалевский Р. Л. Интернациональная лексика и пути ее возникновения.— В кн.: Исследования по романо-германскому языкознанию. Волгоград, 1969, с. 14.

⁹ Rozenbergs J. Latviešu valodas praktiskā stilistika.— Rīgā: Zvaigzne, 1976, 5. lpp.