Technical neologisms

Our world leaves in period of technical progress. Science invents so menu things we hadn’t earlier, and they need names. The neologisms are sometimes invented with an aim euphémisant. Thus the expression SDF (to qualify the homeless person, and the tramps), today running, is an expression invented by the official institution resulting in a social categorization in which does not appear the concept of Pauvreté and of Misère. The expression Social plan is another term invented by the institution, which, by the use of the social positive adjective, allows euphémiser the notion of the associated dismissals. All languages have the means of creating new words to bear new meanings. These can be new creations; “Kodak” is one such, invented at the end of the 19th century by George Eastman; “chortle,” now in general use, was a jocular creation of the English writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll (creator of Alice in Wonderland); and “gas” was formed in the 17th century by the Belgian chemist and physician Jan Baptist van Helmont as a technical term in chemistry, loosely modelled on the Greek chaos (“formless void”). But mostly languages follow definite patterns in their innovations. Usually, the bits and pieces of words used in this way are those found in other such combinations, but this is not always so. The technical term permafrost (terrain that never thaws, as in the Arctic) contains a bit of “permanent” probably not hitherto found in any other word. [4] A particular source of technical neologisms in European languages has been the words and word elements of Latin and Greek. This is part of the cultural history of Western Europe, in so many ways the continuation of Greco-Roman civilization. “Microbiology” and “dolichocephalic” are words well formed according to the rules of Greek as they would be taken over into English, but no records survive of mikrobiologia and dolichokephalikos ever having been used in Ancient Greek. The same is true of Latinate creations such as “reinvestment” and “longiverbosity.” The long tradition of looking to Latin and, since the Renaissance, to Greek also as the languages of European civilization, keeps alive the continuing formation of learned and scientific vocabulary in English and other European languages from these sources. The dependence on the classical languages in Europe is matched by a similar use of Sanskrit words for certain parts of learned vocabulary in some modern Indian languages (Sanskrit being the classical language of India). Such phenomena are examples of loanwords, one of the readiest sources for vocabulary extension.that a language that doesn't grow - that doesn't change with time will eventually die. And I completely agree. The way I see it, a language grows by innovation. When a people use a language, they come across something new that needs to be communicated; a word gets altered, adapted, changed, to communicate the new concept. We don't want the language to innovate. We want the language to borrow. A new concept comes along, usually with a word in English, and without thinking twice about how Hindi would express the same concept, we borrow the word. There are examples all over the place. When Xerox first developed a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to use on a computer, they also developed a pointing device. It was an instrument connected to the computer that controlled an arrow like cursor on the screen. You moved the device, it moved the arrow, and by clicking the buttons you could provide input to the computer. The device was an oblong shaped half sphere, about 4 inches long, with a cable that ran to the back of the computer. To some creative mind, it looked like a small mouse with a long tail, so they called it a mouse. In Spanish, they call it a "ratos" (think rat). In Hindi, we can easily call it a "moosa" (Sanskrit for mouse). But its so much easier to just call it a "mouse" even in Hindi. Do we not have a word for the concept? Why do we need to borrow a completely foreign word for something that we already have a word for? Why a window is (as in Microsoft Windows) not called a "patt" in Hindi? Most of the time that's what it is - an information board, a "pop up screen". Why do we seem to use "website" as a word in Hindi? To me, it's a "parav/padav" (stopping point). Why an Internet portal is called a portal? Because it's a launching point from where a surfer can go in many different directions. May be we should call it a "chauraahaa" in Hindi. Let’s go outside the world of hi-tech. Hindi newspapers always talk about which party has how many "seats" in the parliament. How come we don't use the word "baithak" for it? Since when is "metro" a Hindi word for a local train system in a city? It's not even a word in English. Doordarshan and Aakashvani of course have been abandoned as Hindi words for television and radio - they have simply become proper nouns - names of corporations, leaving us with nothing better than "Teevee" as a Hindi word. How come we call the burning cloth version of a torch a "mashaal", but we call the battery-bulb version a "torch" in Hindi? We have a "gaari/gaadi" - as a moving vehicle. But for some reason, a car is just as much a Hindi word. Was this because Hindi needed to "change with the times"? Or is this something else? Yes, a language must grow. If it doesn't, it perishes. But does a language grow because people who use it are creative and innovative with it? They think it, they speak it, they write it, and they use it? Or does it grow because they're too lazy to try to explain things to their readers in their own words, and find it much easier to simply borrow and replace? By simply borrowing words from another language, is Hindi growing? Or is it loosing its identity as the soul of over half of the population of the country, and becoming a language incapable of being the national communication channel of India? If most of the words in Hindi are not native, would it still remain and independent language? Would people read any literature written in it? Would there be any Nobel prizes for Hindi scholars? Or would they simply be ignored and described as a "mish-mash language that came about after the British invaded India»? They might call me a purist, who doesn't want to see the language modernize itself. But we'll let them know - we coined the Hindi word for a remote control. It doesn't get any more modern than wirelessly influencing an electrical appliance. And, we coined the Hindi word for a cursor - sure we needed help from a two year old kid to come up with that one - but he did better than most professional Hindi journalists out there.(by Agastya Kohli, Illinois Institute of Technology). Technical neologisms present morphological difficulties as regards inflection - some rules can be applied in these situations:

- older words with a larger circulation can be reproduced phonetically: miting, lider

- newer words with limited circulation are written and pronounced as in SL, as regards inflection, that can differ from case to case depending on the user, either keeping the English inflection or using the English inflection: watt – wait, know how – know hows, holding – holdingul.

The newly introduced terms, especially those belonging to a specialized vocabulary, cannot be left aside as they reflect the novelties which occurred in those domains. These usually join a new concept non-existent in TL, and if we want to clearly understand the meaning of these terms and use them properly we need a good command of them. Specialized languages are the greatest suppliers of neologisms in a language, a branch of applied linguistics - terminology - emerged in order to prevent the wrong and ambiguous assimilation, to give coherence and adjust these terms in accordance with the organic rules governing TL. Terminology is aimed at both researching and inventoring technical vocabulary; it does not deal with coining new terms or words and it is rather focussed on finding new equivalents for the words of foreign origin. The methods which terminology relies on - identification, analysis, creation of new terms - turn it into a practical application, rather than a science, and it works by making the difference between term and concept. Terminology works on two levels: 1) functional - which means facilitating communication and 2) conceptual - newly created terms must follow certain requirements: they must be pronounced easily, they must be concise, they must enable the formation of new terms with the help of affixes, they must be correct from a liguistical point of view, it is also advisable that the newly created term should not have many spellings. It is terminology that makes these connections and establishes the relationship between semantics, lexicology and exact sciences and deals with adjusting and adopting foreign origin words to the needs of TL. Specialized terms imply very complex translation problems and translators are not the only persons involved in this process: Romanian specialists in the field of technology, linguists and translators put their minds together to find the equivalent which better covers the reality expressed by the English lexical unit. When finding equivalents, specialists must take into account the following requirements: create/find a term which should be productive, which should not develop and have synonyms or homonyms and of course which should be in accordance with the syntactical rules of the language. Many technical and scientific terms are obtained in Romanian by literal translation and confixation [4]. As it can be seen in the examples above, many of the terms, especially technical terms, cannot be translated by a single word, this might be a reason why the English terms are preferred.

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