[Lingtyp] terminology for typology, was "clitics": recent historical origins

[Jocelyn Aznar]

Hi everyone,

Maybe we should change the topic of this conversation as it kind of
pollutes the initial discussion on clitics now.

I think one issue that prevent this discussion to be fruitful, is how
political is the practice of terminology is. Having a terminology means
also having people/an institution maintaining it and a policy for
managing who is part of the terminology board. I guess one could think
of having this kind of terminology handled by ISO, that would be
something I find very sad somehow¹. It would create tensions between
researchers, and even institutions when people's opinion differ on the
terminology and get themself restricted as they cannot express
scientifically themself in journals that will enforce certain
terminology usage, or will be more reluctant to publish papers that
doesn't follow THE official terminology. Also, a terminology would be
written in a given(s) language(s), so should the publications be
restricted to those in which this terminology is?

When we accept that doing terminology is doing linguistic policies, and
that how we build policies is part of their relevance, we can engage
with its political aspects. And I think in this kind of project, it's
more important how we cooperate than the initial results. Somehow, the
organization and the workflow are part of the relevance of a given
system of references. Maybe certain wiki approaches would enable an
interesting and relevant workflow for this kind of project.

But, in the end, what is the problem exactly? Is anyone preventing
someone or a group of people to gather and compile a terminology,
publishing it and then use it whenever they publish an article? Why
would one wants to force others using a specific terminology ?

Finally, I could imagine that a particular call or journal¹ could
enforce the usage of certain terms, as part of their editorial project, but.

All the best,
Jocelyn Aznar

¹ I could comeback on this if someone feels it's necessary.

² And that might be a way to try a terminology, to create a
journal/calls and asking for people to use a specific terminology.

Le 08/12/2021 à 16:46, Jess Tauber a écrit :
> I dunno- the rise of a standard chemical terminology by the
> International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) streamlined
> communication within that field, which prior to this was plagued by
> large numbers of terms by different workers for the same phenomena.
> Similar, I think, to the unifying effect of the adoption of the Metric
> System after the French Revolution.
> 
> Jess Tauber
> 
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> On Wed, Dec 8, 2021 at 10:30 AM Anna Alexandrova
> <anna.alexandrova at uniroma1.it <mailto:anna.alexandrova at uniroma1.it>> wrote:
> 
>     I feel like we tend to overstate the role of the one-to-one
>     correspondence in the terminology used by sciences. Just a random
>     example: in mathematics, the falling factorial is also called lower
>     factorial, descending factorial, and falling sequential product.
>     Some mathematicians don't even know that it is called this way. It
>     is not really important. I'm not sure that it is the totally unified
>     terminology that makes a research domain more scientific.
>     ᐧ
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