International Scientific Vocabulary

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

International Scientific Vocabulary (or ISV) is a form of vocabulary comprising scientific words whose language of origin may or may not be certain, but which are in current use in several modern languages among scientists. The name "International Scientific Vocabulary" ("ISV") is not universally used to label such vocabulary, but it is used in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961) and elsewhere.

As Webster's Third explains, "some ISV words (like haploid) have been created by taking a word with a rather general and simple meaning from one of the languages of antiquity, usually Latin and Greek, and conferring upon it a very specific and complicated meaning for the purposes of modern scientific discourse." An ISV word is typically a compound or a derivative which "gets only its raw materials, so to speak, from antiquity." Its morphology may vary across languages.

The online version of Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (Merriam-Webster, 2002) (available by subscription) further clarifies that an ISV neologism is "a part of the vocabulary of the sciences and other specialized studies that consists of words or other linguistic forms current in two or more languages and differing from New Latin in being adapted to the structure of the individual languages in which they appear." ^[1] In other words, ISV terms are often made with Greek, Latin, or other combining forms, but each language pronounces the resulting neo-lexemes within its own phonemic "comfort zone," and makes morphological connections using its normal morphological system.

[edit] References

1. ^ "international scientific vocabulary." Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (11 Jul. 2006).

see also meta-semantics