Developing technical terminology

[Rudy Troike]

Happy New Year to Y'all! And thanks to Phil for his thoughtful reflections and
suggestions, which I have passed along to another couple of lists.

    Re Mia's comments about the difficulty of constructing new native terms
for new technical/conceptual phenomena, the lessons from the field of so-
called 'language planning' can be instructive. Terminology evolves or is
borrowed/adapted as users make use of the language to do so -- artificial
efforts, unless institutionally enforced, are unlikely to take root or have
effect. Some years ago I heard of a dictionary project in Nigeria which was
organized by a group of academics who were trying to "modernize" some language
for dealing with the technological culture beginning to affect them. The
anecdote I heard involved their invention of a number of terms for parts of
an automobile -- then someone subsequently visited auto repair shops in the
city and found that self-trained mechanics (my grandfather was one such) had
come up with their own terms, which they were, in the course of daily 
give-and-
take, already beginning to standardize. Sometimes this involves borrowing and
indigenization, as has happened with English over the centuries, and sometimes
it involves extension of native elements and linguistic resources. Borrowing
has the psycholinguistic value of facilitating processing transfer from
another linguistic code -- witness the international use of much scientific,
technical, and conceptual terminology (only in Germany was the use of
"telephone" resisted and an artificial translated form "Fernsprecher" insisted
upon). Even in linguistics it is easy to spot borrowed correspondences for
"syntax", "phoneme", "morphology", even "linguistics". Though linguists are
loath to admit it, word-learning involves (as capturable in Object-Oriented
Programming) the acquisition of whole "packages" of information/knowledge,
and it takes some practice to transfer this packaged information to another
language, even one's native language. When one of my students from Italy,
who had studied Chomsky's Government and Binding model with me, got hold of
a new book setting forth this model in Italian, he reported to me that he
had difficulty reading it, since he was used to thinking about the topic in
English. The early culture contact between Navajo and Spanish speakers led
to the borrowing of a small number of Spanish terms, which are now simply part
of the native vocabulary (and terms such as "caballo" for 'horse' diffused
widely between Native languages even in the absence of direct contact, while
others modified the term for 'dog' one way or another). Such "organic"
adaptation can be a productive way to import technological knowledge into
the Native discourse, and thereby helping indigenize it, rather than treating
the conceptual information as ineffable in the Native language because there
is no certifiable Native way of referring to it. This can begin as simple
code-switching, much the way Arab or Chinese speakers on campus pepper their
conversation with English university-life related terms such as "semester",
"final examination", etc., even though ways might be found (or exist) to
label such concepts in their native languages. When people can begin to feel
comfortable discussing new concepts in their native language, even using
imported terminology (note that 80% of the vocabulary in most advanced texts
in English is borrowed), they can begin to take ownership of it, and it can
more readily become incorporated into the expanding and modernizing Native
culture. Without that, the language becomes a museum piece, and the community
eventually abandons it as no longer signficantly functional.

    Rudy