Technical terminology- where did it came from?

    By Merilin Urbala

    Technical terminology is a specialized vocabulary that is used in a certain career, not just in technical fields. To make this easier to understand, technical terminology is basically all those complex words used during some career that some of us may never understand and probably won't have to. For example, let's start with medical terminology.

                I'm sure at least some of us have heard couple of doctors talk between them and wondered what in the world are they saying. I know I have. Imagine if a doctor came up to you and said "I'm sorry but we have to do a esophagogastroscopy," you would probably just look at them and ask them for an explanation. That is of course if you're not a medical student or something similar. Basically what the doctors were saying to you was that they need to do the examination with an endoscope of the oesophagus and stomach. Endoscope being an instrument for examining the insides of your body and oesophagus being the portion of the digestive canal between the pharynx and stomach. I would like to take a pause and thank online medical dictionaries for that knowledge.

                To carry on with the topic, I am going to discuss where did the terminology came from. As 'Medical terminology: self-study course' PDF file by Oregon Department of Human Services: Seniors and People with Disabilities states "In medical terminology there are three possible word parts. Any given medical term may contain one, some or all of these parts." Those parts being prefixes, roots and suffixes. As we already know, prefixes are the parts at the beginning of the word, like anti meaning against, tachy meaning fast or rapid, poly meaning many and so on. Root is the word that contains the basic meaning, like cardi meaning heart or pseudo meaning false or fake. Suffixes are the parts at the end, like -ism meaning state of or -ology meaning study of. Like most of the roots and prefixes in medical terminology, suffixes also came from Latin or Greek.

                This leads me on to another fact that most of the technical terminology comes from either Latin, Greek or French as the term itself comes from Latin, terminus technicus, meaning 'technical term.'  Reading an article called "Latin and Its Influence on English Language," it is said at the very beginning how Latin is still widely used in various fields like medicine or technology or science or so on which certainly had a great effect on different terminology. Even linguistic terminology in English is influenced by Latin. Affix, suffix and prefix are all influenced by Latin, says Professor Dr. Ingo Plag.

                In the end, it seems that most of the technical terminology has come from borrowings from mostly Latin but also Greek and French and also word-formation and morphemes have a big part in technical terminology as bound morphemes with Latin history seem to be popular in technical language.

 

 

 

Reference:

http://language.articleberry.com/latin-and-its-influence-on-english-language

http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_terminology

"The Cambridge Encyclopedia of: The English Language," second edition by David Crystal, 2003

"Word-Formation in English," Professor Dr. Ingo Plag, 2003