Keletas minčių apie terminologiją

Kazimieras GAIVENIS Institute of the Lithuanian Language, Vilnius A FEW THOUGHTS ON TERMINOLOGY It is said that in the courtyard of the Sorbonne there stands a sundial bearing the Latin inscription “Sicut umbra dies nostrae” (“Like a shadow are our days”). Science is indeed great and eternal, while human life is short. Yet not all sciences are alike. Some branches of science emerge, quickly gain strength, and make great progress at once, whereas others develop slowly and laboriously. Terminology is an applied branch of science. Throughout the world, it is taking shape slowly and with difficulty, as if unsure where it belongs—to linguistics, computer science, or some other branch of science. Linguists have shown little interest in terminology to date, probably because much of it is nonlinguistic, borrowed from other sciences. Specialists in traditional branches of linguistics often do not understand the content (semantics) of terms from other fields or the relationships among them. Meanwhile, for many a physicist, mathematician, physician, economist, or engineer, terminology is associated primarily with linguistics. These specialists are often unsettled by the evaluation of term forms, the notion of their correctness, and the grammatical treatment and accentuation of terms. Terminology was first developed by engineers (E. Wüster, E. Drezen, D. Lotė, and others), who set out to standardize technical terminology internationally. However, it is said that it became a true science only when linguists also became involved in its development. Indeed, the success of practical work in terminology depends to a great extent on the informed cooperation of specialists from various scientific fields and linguist-terminologists. Linguists are sometimes even criticized for failing to coin the necessary neologisms. For example, one journalist recently wrote the following about the neologism žiniasklaida, which spread quickly and is now used by everyone: “Linguists really are pathetically behind. Only after several years of using ‘mass media’ did they manage to cobble together the phonetic monstrosity ‘žiniasklaida’. As if from Vydūnas’s time.” Well, there you have it! It seems linguists are expected to be on guard and quickly clean up the rubbish bins of speech. Unfortunately... It is well known to everyone 89 that it is not linguists but specialists who create terms. More precisely, they are created by the entire educated public, which accepts or rejects proposed neologisms and foreign words. Not only journalists but also scholars often fail to assess whether neologisms are correct. For example, the following reasoning was offered when evaluating the Lithuanian equivalent rinkmena for the term failas: “The substitute rinkmena is inaccurate; it cannot mean the result of collecting, a particular collection. It can mean only a single unit that is collected. After all, puošmena is a separate unit of ornamentation, žymena a separate element of a mark, ėmena a separate unit that is taken, and so on.” Let us consult the multivolume Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language. It states that the word rinkmenė means a collection. So why can’t the word rinkmena mean a “collection”? Where and by whom was it determined that the word žymena means “an element of a mark”? The word ėmena, meanwhile, was probably coined by the author himself; it is not found in dictionaries. Thus, only linguists can objectively assess the correctness of terminological neologisms. Definitions of neologisms, and explanations of their characteristics more generally, most often point to two things: 1) neologisms are newly formed words, and users can sense their newness; 2) neologisms most often arise as a result of cultural and scientific development and changes in social relations, and name a new object or express a new concept. These points are generally true, but relative. The novelty of vigorous neologisms fades very quickly, while less vigorous ones may compete with international words for decades without displacing them. For example, the word nuošimtis never succeeds in displacing the word procentas, nor pūdinys – komposto, and so on. Moreover, it is not entirely accurate to assume that social progress encourages the creation of neologisms more than the internal processes of language development do. In some fields of science, few international neologisms are used, while in others the opposite is true. A great many international words are used in the terminology of chemistry, music, astronomy, computer science, and other fields. Linguists find it difficult to say whether a newly emerging international term is needed or not. For example, is the term benzenas needed alongside benzolo, butenas alongside butileno, cimenas alongside cimolo, fosfanas alongside fosfino, ksilenas alongside ksilolo, nafta 90 lenas alongside naphthalene, etc. In fact, the first terms in these pairs are terms recommended or permitted for use by IUPAC, whereas the second are listed in the *Explanatory Dictionary of Chemical Terms* (Vilnius, 1997) with the abbreviation ntk. (term not recommended). In addition, in the nomenclature of chemical compounds, alongside non-systematic (traditional) names, systematic names formed according to international rules are now also used. For example, water is a non-systematic name, while dihydrogen oxide is the systematic one; oxygen is non-systematic, while dioxygen is systematic; ozone is non-systematic, while trioxygen is systematic; boric acid is non-systematic, while trihydrogen trioxoborate (3−) is systematic, etc. In other cases, systematic and non-systematic names often coincide, e.g., sodium fluoride, zinc sulfide, lithium hydroxide, etc. In general, o n l y s p e c i a l i s t s c a n b e s t a s s e s s t h e n e e d f o r i n t e r n a t i o n a l w o r d s i n t e r m i n o l o g y. Linguists can better understand only the relations between international and Lithuanian words. When creating neologisms in terminology and compound terms denoting species, the question of motivation often arises. Motivated terms are easier to remember, and their place in terminological microsystems is identified more quickly. In general, however, motivation does not play a decisive role in terminology, since wholly unmotivated terms are also used perfectly well, as are foreign words whose motivation is entirely unclear to us, e.g.: barn, “a unit of effective cross section for nuclear processes that produce radioactive isotopes”; cymene, “1-isopropyl-4-methylbenzene”; damar, “hardened resin of tropical trees Agathis dammara”; potto, “a prosimian Perodicticus potto, living in Africa,” and so on. There are thousands upon thousands of such terms. It is probably reasonable to think that motivation is more important for species terms than for generic terms. After all, species are distinguished from one another by modifiers that reflect essential distinguishing features. In terminology, however, there are cases where a species feature “contradicts” the derivational meaning of the head term, e.g.: marsh warbler (Acrocephalus dumetorum Blyth), wood mushroom (Agaricus silvaticus), sponge dung beetle (Megasternum boletophagum Marsh.), and the like. Such terms are neither defective nor in need of correction. Specialists in various branches of science and production sometimes vigorously defend incorrectly used active participles 91 used as species modifiers (e.g., intoxicating beverages, deciding vote, and the like), and condemn genitive constructions being terminologized (e.g., road traffic, labor protection, state control, and the like). Terminologization cannot, after all, eliminate differences in meaning between word combinations in the standard language or make them strictly unambiguous. In general, in practical work on the standardization of terms, specialists in various branches of science and production often overestimate the importance of motivation for terminological precision and make terminology overly logical. The content of a term is not its lexical meaning but its definition, which depends neither on the term’s motivation nor on its derivational meaning. The Polish terminologist S. Gajda writes in his book *Introduction to Terminology* (*Wprowadzenie do teorii terminu*) (Opole, 1990) that a term is not the servant of two masters, but of many. This is because terminology is associated with the philosophy of science, logic, linguistics, psychology, computer science, and so on. Hence the question arises whether a comprehensive theory of terminology is possible. S. Gajda answers in the affirmative. A comprehensive theory of terminology is also important because the international coordination of terminology, the preparation of standards for terms, and the creation of terminology databases are becoming increasingly relevant. Received 1998 05 25 92