مجلة علوم اللسان
Volume 2, Numéro 2, Pages 11-35
2013-12-01

Medical English: "a Museum In Words"

Authors : Alcaraz Maria Angeles .

Abstract

Any contact among different cultures, hence among their languages, shows certain effects from each of these contacts, especially in the form of additions to their vocabularies. One of the reasons why words are taken over by one language from another is the answer to a definite need', i.e. words are adopted because they express ideas that are new or because they are so intimately associated with an object or a concept that their acceptance involves acceptance of the words used to denominate them. This adoption of foreign words or "lexical borrowing" (Haugen 1950, Hope 1971) is one of the normal neological processes that every language has at its disposal to enrich its lexis.

Keywords

medical vocabulary; culture contact; lexical identification