[Lexicog] Creation of scientific terminology

Mali Translation translation_mali at SIL.ORG
Sat Apr 10 10:17:52 UTC 2004


I am working in a majority West African language (Bambara/Jula).
Systematic efforts are being made by African linguists to create
a new scientific terminology in many domains. The language
lends itself to all kinds of creative and productive word
formation through compounding, prefixes, infixes, suffixes.
I follow these endeavours with great interest.
Let's take an example. The language can coin new
words that express the idea of anti- (antibody, antibiotics,
antipode, anticommunist). While anti- works in all these
cases in a number of Western languages, Jula/Bambara has
at least 4 ways to express the idea that underlies anti-
in each respective case.
Do you know of similar efforts of systematic terminology
creation in a non-Western language that was reduced to
writing not too long ago (say in the last 25 years)?
If yes, can you give examples of how they handled Greek/
Latin prefixes like auto-, bi-, bio-, dia-, endo-, exo-,
equi-, hetero-, homo-, inter-, intra-, iso-, meta-, pseudo-,
trans-?

Fritz Goerling




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