Dėl mokslo terminų vienareikšmiškumo supratimo

On Understanding the Unambiguous Nature of Scientific Terms STASYS KEINYS KEYWORDS: term, scientific term, terminology, unambiguity As I sat down to write this article, the words of the Šeteniai-born (near Kalnaberžė) writer, professor of literature, and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz emerged from some recess of my memory: “<...> to name and enclose a bird in letters is almost the same as having it forever” (Milošas 1991: 124). I was glad that this thought might suit a broader discussion of terms. For over the five decades that I have been directly involved with terms and terminology, I have repeatedly heard and read that a term must be one and the same not only for all users, but almost forever. The same in both form and meaning—that is, like the name of the bird, with one form and one meaning. Here are a couple of the many possible testimonies to this. First. Exactly one hundred years ago, at the general meeting of the Lithuanian Scientific Society (the Academy of Sciences of our time), the physician Kazys Grinius, a doctor in the colloquial sense, explaining “What can be demanded of scientific terminology?”, first remarked: “That there should be one name, one word for each concept, because a scientific term is a true nomen proprium and must be only one1 (Grinius 1914: 432–433). The second testimony is this: “A term is, so to speak, a tiny quotation. According to the rules of citation, a term must retain one and the same meaning in all scholarly works within a given field of knowledge,”—this is how, some thirty years ago, Professor of Philology at Moscow’s Mikhail Lomonosov University, Jurij Roždžestvenskis (Рождественский 1979: 141), taught students in his published Introduction to General Philology. It can be said that the unambiguity of the term discussed here has long been sought, and that once not only products but also their own… began to be standardized 1 Quotations in the article have not been edited; accents have only occasionally been added. Terminologija | 2013 | 20 47 and the names of their parts, that aim was made one of the most important requirements of terminology. It is not surprising that this was especially emphasized in their terminological works by the engineers who had been actively engaged in standardization since the fourth decade of the previous century: the Russian Dmitrijus Lotė (1898–1950), the Austrian Eugen as Viusteris (1898–1977), and the Latvian Ernestas Drezenas (1892–1937), who worked on standardization in Russia at the same time. The theory of terms developed primarily on a logical basis by the first two is still alive today, although after the Second World War linguists, at least some of them, began to study specialist language and terminology from within and considerably softened the categorical nature of those requirements. For language has a system of meanings and ways of expressing them, common to both ordinary and specialist language, which formed over hundreds—and, if we include proto-languages, thousands—of years and permeated the consciousness of its users; to take it by force and alter it through externally imposed requirements is not useful work for the society of that language’s users. This was perfectly understood and expressed at almost the same time, even a little earlier, by a contemporary of the aforementioned engineers, our philosopher and terminologist Professor Stasys Šalkauskis (1886–1941). In his study of terminology theory, published at the time in the pre-war Logos journal and now reprinted in Raštai, he wrote: “<...> and having entered scientific terminology, words do not become semantically fixed, but remain subject to further evolution, which never ends as long as language is alive in the spirit of a nation” (Šalkauskis 1991: 43). When examining the issue of the unambiguity of both words and terms, one should not lose sight of the fact that the words vienareikšmis, vienareikšmiškas and vienareikšmiškumas themselves are not unambiguous. In Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos žodynas, since its second edition, two meanings of these words have been distinguished, depending on whether the matter in question has, first, only one meaning, or, second, the same meaning (DŽ 1972: 934). It seems that both meanings are intended when people speak or write about the semantics of terms as well. And although lists of the characteristics of terms usually, or at least most often, mention only the possession of a single meaning, the previously quoted passage from J. Rožd estvenskis’s book emphasizes adherence to the s a m e meaning (for accuracy, the quotation is repeated here in the original language): «Термин является как бы минимальной цитатой. По правилам цитирования термин должен сохраняться в одном и том же значении во всех научных сочинениях, принадлежащих к определенной области знания.» To tell the truth, it is not easy to understand this author’s categorical stance, since he writes not about a term isolated in itself as a unit or member of a certain system, nor about the standardization or fixing of a term, but about its use. 48 Stasys Keinys | Dėl mokslo terminų vienareikšmiškumo supratimo It is worth keeping these two cases of a term’s existence—its fixing and standardization, and its use—in view at all times in terminological work and scholarly research. In works of standardization and fixing—that is, in terminological dictionaries, encyclopedias, standards, and so on—a term is, as it were, frozen, made rigid, and the essence of its meaning is presented. It is easy to present it here as one wishes: as unambiguous, without synonyms, and so forth. But it is the user who gives a term life, and that user, first and foremost the creator of a scholarly text (though one should not forget its recipient—the listener or reader), determines whether the term is used (and understood) exactly as stipulated by the provider or providers, or whether its meaning is narrowed, broadened, shifted, or refined in some respect. After all, we surely do not think that terminologists, unlike everyone else, are infallible omniscient beings, better than all others at understanding and naming the things designated by terms. St. Šalkauskis had noticed this issue and expressed it aptly as follows: “The semantic evolution of terminology has its basis in the fact that every word acquires a certain shade of meaning from the context in which it is used” (Šalkauskis 1991: 43). A little further on, he continued: “One must clearly understand that the very nature of language does not at all require the meaning and sense of words to be defined so strictly that no freedom remains to use these words in a particular way, as the characteristics of new contexts may require. The freezing of the sense and meaning of words within the iron framework of a dictionary determined once and for all would so constrain the free course of human thought that its intellectual initiative would suffer greatly as a result” (Šalkauskis 1991: 44). One might think that this reflects the aforementioned engineers’ and, more broadly, the so-called exact sciences’ outlook and understanding coming into conflict with those of the philosopher and researchers in the humanities generally, a conflict arising from differences in the objects, nature, and needs of those sciences. Yet philosophy is not only a separate discipline but also the general methodology of science, while development is characteristic of all fields of science just as it is of all existence. Language and its terminology are no exception. Incidentally, in our terminological dictionaries, terms are usually presented without examples of usage, and authors of scholarly works often leave unexplained the deviations or variants in meaning that they themselves use. Consequently, readers or listeners have to work out for themselves what was meant by a given term. It should be said that the general claim that terms must be unambiguous and that their ambiguity is a flaw in terminology is understood literally by quite a few specialists in various fields, as a dogma, and is begun to be Terminologija | 2013 | 20 49 applied to the terminology of language as a whole. However, there is no way to endorse the pursuit of such complete, absolute unambiguity, because putting it into practice would require a massive upheaval in terminology and, as noted above, the dismantling of a naming system that has become established over a long period and taken root in the consciousness of language users. Would anyone really want the term šaknis ‘root’ to be used only in botany and horticulture, and blame linguists, anatomists, and specialists in other fields for transferring its meaning and adapting this plant-science term to their own disciplines? It is doubtful that people would understand one another more easily if the word taškas ‘point’ had only its ordinary-language meaning, ‘a small round mark, a spot’ (LKŽ XV 982), and entirely different names were invented or borrowed for linguistics, mathematics, physics, technology, sport, and other purposes. True, language has ways and means at its disposal for carrying out such a lexical upheaval, but transferring and adapting the meanings of words or terms is itself one of the most characteristic ways of meeting naming needs. Moreover, this method helps protect language from an influx of neologisms and/or borrowings from other languages, so it is economical for the language and very convenient for users: using a familiar word or term, even if its meaning has been somewhat changed and adapted to another field, is much simpler than understanding and remembering a new, entirely unfamiliar, unmotivated borrowing—or, as often happens, an atypically formed neologism. The requirement—or, in my view, more accurately, the preference—for a term to be unambiguous within the field or system to which it belongs seems closer to reality. Related fields are usually mentioned together, but cases in which terms used in different fields should have exactly the same meaning seem rare, or even very rare. In a pinch, one could mention, for example, names of speech organs borrowed from anatomical nomenclature—or perhaps in some cases directly from living ordinary language—into linguistics (especially phonetics, or the study of sounds). (Surely no one would praise a linguist who began making up neologisms for this purpose or using borrowings from some other language.) Yet, immediately afterwards, as if forgetting the names of their own organs of speech, some phoneticians use Lithuanianized borrowed adjectives to name sounds produced with those organs: dentalinis ‘dental’, labialinis ‘labial’, nazalinis ‘nasal’, uvuliarinis ‘uvular’, and so on, as well as borrowed names for the corresponding phenomena, labializacija, nazalizacija, and so on. Admittedly, this is another matter—the unambiguity of terms, and thus not the subject of this paper, though it is inseparable from it, since expression and meaning are a duality within unity, two necessary sides of the same sign, without which it could not exist). 50 Stasys Keinys | Dėl mokslo terminų vienareikšmiškumo supratimo The transfer of a term into another field is usually associated with adapting, refining, or changing its meaning. And perhaps on more than one occasion there may be a desire to unite such partial (field-specific) terms under a kind of overarching term with the most general meaning. For it seems obvious that, having passed from biology into linguistics and some other sciences, the term element morfologija has become such an overarching term, meaning “the science of forms,” while in those fields and their branches terms with meanings narrowed according to the object of study are used, for example, augalų morfologija, gyvūnų morfologija, kalbos (žodžių) morfologija, kraujo morfologija, and the single-word terms citomorfologija “cell morphology,” geomorfologija “earth morphology,” and so on. By the way, at least in our language’s explanatory dictionaries, as well as in encyclopedias, it is customary to give only those particular meanings, divided according to fields of science. Perhaps this stems from the fact that, apparently, no such science of general morphology yet exists. However, this should not hinder the differentiation of word meanings. In trying to understand the matters under discussion, we enter the domain of the semantic relations between terms of general science and other broader fields (we could also call such general terms, which usually have the broadest meanings, existing, true, overarching terms), as well as interdisciplinary terms, and the meanings of terms belonging to particular scientific fields and their branches—or, in other words, the relations between terms of broader and narrower scope in connection with univocity and ambiguity. For example, the word forma is a general term in science, technology, and art, used in its broadest meaning in philosophy: “an element of reality and the process of cognition that gives cognizable objects distinctness and identity” (VLE VI 187). In separate areas and branches of human activity, this term is used on its own or as a component of compound terms, with a meaning adapted and defined accordingly; for example, in linguistics forma is most often used in two meanings: the broader “expression, mode of expression” and the narrower, more specific “grammatical gender” (cf. EWJP 1978: 89; DL 1980: 222–223; KTŽ 1990: 65, 75, 88, 166, 241; Булыгина, Крылов 1990: 557–558). Whether viewed from the perspective of the broader or narrower semantics of a particular term in a field or branch, how many meanings, and of what breadth, are assigned to an individual term or group of terms also depends on how terminological meaning is understood and differentiated, what its relations are to the concept being named, its scope, and the act of naming itself, and how much account is taken, in naming, of the systematic tendencies of the language’s vocabulary. For instance, in contemporary standard language, it is customary for words and terms derived from occupational designations for persons with the suffix -ystė to denote the theory and practice (science and business) of that field or branch Terminologija | 2013 | 20 51 teoriją ir praktiką (mokslą ir verslą), pvz.: bitininkystė, daržininkystė, gyvulininkystė, jūrininkystė, oreivystė, paukštininkystė, žemdirbystė ir kt. Tačiau terminologijoje pasitaiko išimčių – šalia miškininkystės gal dėl per stipriai pajusto termino nevienareikšmiškumo, gal dėl mokslininkų orumo ar abiejų dalykų iš karto, o gal dar dėl ko kito yra pasidarytas mokslo pavadinimas miškotyra, o iš šio ir tyrėją žymintis žodis miškotyrininkas. Prieš kurį laiką iš bibliotekininkystės taip pat buvo siūloma atimti mokslo reikšmę ir tą mokslą vadinti bibliotekotyra ar net bibliotekologija. Tiesą sakant, labai abejotina, ar verta šitaip naujadarais klibinti nusistovėjusią įvardijamąją kalbos santvarką. We should not lose sight of the fact that works recording terminology may not give all the meanings of the terms included. For example, about three decades ago, while working with Kazimieras Gaivenis on a dictionary of linguistic terms, I examined a small pile of available terminology dictionaries for linguistics in several languages and was surprised to find that the designation for each part of speech was explained in them only as a grammatical class of words, while an equally old meaning—that of an individual word belonging to that class, far more common in the work and practice of linguistics—was not mentioned. We agreed to include the terms in that group in the dictionary with two meanings (and, by the way, after the dictionary appeared, more than one of our linguists praised us for this). Both terminology dictionaries and, especially, usage in the language of a subject show that a certain proportion of terms have more than one meaning. This is particularly characteristic of terms common to the sciences and terms specific to an individual science. Among terms used in linguistic works, a very clear indication of ambiguity is the fundamental term kalba, which in Lithuanian most often expresses not only Ferdinand de Saussure’s famous triad langue, parole, langage, but also quite a few other meanings. The Russian philosopher and philologist Professor Aleksei Losev discussed the polysemy of terms shared across disciplines in an article published in 1978 (and reprinted in 1982), “The Polysemy of Terms in Theories of Sign and Symbol,” in which he wrote: “Terms such as ženklas, reikšmė, struktūra, modelis, simbolis have dozens of different meanings in the usage of different authors. One should not assume that some single terminology must be obligatory in this field, to the exclusion of other terminological principles. The only thing that can be required of authors is that, when using one terminological system or another, they adhere to their chosen terminology consistently and do not repeatedly vacillate from their adopted system to some other one” (Лосев 1982: 220). 52 Stasys Keinys | Dėl mokslo terminų vienareikšmiškumo supratimo Moreover, there are not only general meanings, whether approved by terminologists or not, but also particular meanings used by movements, currents, schools, and even individual authors in science and other fields, and finally meanings specific only to certain texts or groups of texts—meanings that are probably most often neither prescribed nor proscribed at all. They simply exist and are used quite often. Professor Algirdas Julius Greimas spoke about such individual meanings of terms in his own usage during a 1971 lecture, “Problems of General Semiotics,” at Vilnius University: “If I first distinguish systems of values, as axiologies, from organizations of the functioning of values, which I call ideologies, then this is my personal terminology, and I ask you not to take it as gospel. I only want to say that it is useful here to distinguish one thing, namely, a system of values as a static system (I call it axiology) from a system of values presented to people as a model of activity, which I call ideology. This does not necessarily correspond to the distinctions made in sociology” (Greimas 1991: 48). This terminological remark by the most distinguished and best-known Lithuanian scholar in the scientific world accords perfectly with the design (intention) and central idea of this article: that scientific terms should not be forced into narrow, universally obligatory confines of univocity, since the principles of terminology are not like military regulations, and scholars are not their blind executors. Otherwise, science would not be creative, nor would it contribute to the creation of language. The language of science has many univocal terms, and many terms that are understood and explained in different ways. The reasons for this are varied, as are the ways in which it manifests itself. I did not intend, nor did I hope, to encompass in this article the problems of terminological univocity and polysemy, perhaps worthy of more than one book. I merely wished to explore the problematic nature of the matter on the basis of one field (science) and remind users, creators, and regulators of scientific terminology that in both research and practical terminological work it is not always appropriate to use words with an imperative force, such as reikalavimas, draudimas, privaloma, negalima, and that we probably do not always know ourselves whether a term is truly univocal, much less whether it will retain the same and only one meaning over time. For the language of science, and hence its terms, changes along with the development of science; it changes now, just as it always has, because, in the words of Romualdas Granauskas from the essay “Twelve Ravens Flying Around Daukan­tas,” “<...> science, too, is freedom, while ignorance is iron chains around the neck and oak logs on the legs” (Granauskas 1995: 272). Terminologija | 2013 | 20 5 3 LITERATŪRA DL 1980: Dictionnaire de linguistique par J. Dubois, M. Giacomo, L. Guespin, Chr. Marcellesi, J.-B. Marcellesi, J.-P. Mével, Paris: Librairie Larousse. DŽ 1972: Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos žodynas. II papildytas leidimas. Ats. red. J. Kruopas, Vilnius: Mintis. EWJP 1978: Encyklopedia wiedzy o języku polskim. Pod redakcją St. Urbańczyka, Wrocław–Warszawa–Kraków–Gdańsk: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich Wydawnictwo. Granauskas R. 1995: Vakaras, paskui rytas: Apsakymai ir apysakos, Vilnius: Leidybos centras. Greimas A. J. 1991: Iš arti ir iš toli: Literatūra, kultūra, grožis, Vilnius: Vaga. Grinius K. 1914: Apie botanikos organografijos lietuviškąją terminologiją. – Lietuvių tauta. Kn. 2, d. 3 (1912–1913). Yra ir atskiras K. Griniaus darbo atspaudas. KTŽ 1990: Gaivenis K., Keinys St. Kalbotyros terminų žodynas, Kaunas: Šviesa. LKŽ XV – Lietuvių kalbos žodynas 15. Vyr. red. K. Ulvydas, Vilnius: Mokslas, 1991. Milošas Č. 1991: Isos slėnis. Vertė A. Kalėda, Vilnius: Vaga. Šalkauskis St. 1991: Terminologijos teorija ir bendroji filosofijos terminija. – Raštai 2. Filosofijos ir pedagogikos terminija, Vilnius: Mintis. VLE VI – Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija 6. Vyr. red. A. Račis, Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas, 2004. Булыгина Т. В., Крылов С. А. 1990: Форма в языкознании. – Лингвистический энциклопедический словарь. Гл. ред. В. Н. Ярцева, Москва: Советская энциклопедия. Лосев А. Ф. 1982: Знак. Символ. Миф: Труды по языкознанию, Москва: Издательство Московского университета. Рождественский Ю. В. 1979: Введение в общую филологию, Москва: Высшая школа. ABOUT UNDERSTANDING THE UNAMBIGUITY OF THE TERMS OF SCIENCE Unambiguity is usually treated as one of the important features of a term and quite often it is viewed as one of the main requirements of terms. Therefore polysemy of a term is treated as a fault. However, polysemous terms are quite frequent in term recording works (special dictionaries, encyclopaedias, etc.) as well as in scientific texts of various domains. This article deals with the problem of unambiguity of terms of science in respect of science development and naming system of the language. First of all it is noted that the words and terms vienareikšmis (unambiguous) and vienareikšmiškumas (unambiguity) are not unambiguous themselves, because on the one hand they mean ‘having only one meaning’ and on the other hand – ‘having the same meaning’. When speaking about the unambiguity of terms often both these meanings are kept in mind, but more frequently the oneness of term meaning is emphasized. The Lithuanian philosopher Stasys Šalkauskis (1886–1941) who published his works on terminology theory and practice from 1927 onwards gave a reasoned argument against strict restraint of the meaning of terms. In his work Terminologijos teorija (Terminology Theory) Šalkauskis wrote: “<...> ir patekę į mokslinę terminiją, žodžiai nesustingsta semantiniu atžvilgiu, o yra palenkti tolimesnei evoliucijai, kuri niekados nesibaigia, kol kalba yra gyva tautos dvasioje” (translation: “<...> and when words make their way into scientific terminology they do not freeze in semantic respect, but are inclined towards further evolution which never stops while the language is alive in the spirit of a nation”). These words are very important for the cognition of the essence of science and its language creation. The article rejects an absolutization of unambiguity of scientific terms and argues that the main manifestation of the existence of terms is not their fixation in 54 Stasys Keinys | Dėl mokslo terminų vienareikšmiškumo supratimo dictionaries or encyclopaedias, but scientific texts where terms are used not only in general, but also in partial meanings specific to particular domains and scientific schools as well as in some individual meanings characteristic to particular scientists or to some of their works. This is viewed as a natural thing for the language and terminology of science, because only terminology theory and practice which do not restrict the freedom of scientific creative work can facilitate the development of scientific cognition and ensure the progress of science. К ВОПРОСУ О ПОНИМАНИИ ОДНОЗНАЧНОСТИ ТЕРМИНОВ НАУКИ Однозначность обычно считается важной чертой терминов, нередко даже одним из основных к ним предъявляемых требований, а многозначность – недостатком терминологии. Но как в работах по фиксации научных терминов (в специальных словарях, энциклопедиях и т.п.), так и особенно в научных текстах неоднозначные термины не являются редким исключением. В настоящей статье обсуждается проблема однозначности научных терминов в контексте развития науки и номинативной системы языка. С начала обращается внимание на факт неоднозначности самих слов и терминов vienareikšmis «однозначный» и vienareikšmiškumas «однозначность» – 1) имеющий только одно значение, 2) имеющий тождественное (неизменённое) значение. К терминологии относят оба этих значения, но чаще подчёркивается единственность значения термина. В литовском терминоведении против строгого ограничения значения терминов аргументированно выступил философ и терминолог профессор Стасис Шалкаускіѕ (Stasys Šalkauskis, 1886–1941), с 1927 года включившийся в разработку теории терминологии и создавший словарь философских терминов. В труде по теории терминологии он писал, что после попадания в терминологию науки слова не прекращают семантического развития, которое никогда не оканчивается пока язык остаётся живым в духе народа. Далее в статье показана несостоятельность абсолютизации однозначности научной терминологии, доказывается, что основной сферой существования терминов является не фиксация в словарях или энциклопедиях, а тексты науки, в которых термины используются не только в общих, но и в частных, в том числе свойственных для отдельных научных направлений, школ, значениях. Кроме того, термины употребляются и с индивидуальными значениями, характерными как для отдельных учёных, так и отдельным их трудам. Это считается естественным, так как только ненарушающая свободы научного творчества терминология способствует успешному развитию научного познания и самой науки. Gauta 2013-11-12 Stasys Keinys Lietuvių kalbos institutas P. Vileišio g. 5, LT-10308 Vilnius E. paštas [email protected] Terminologija | 2013 | 20 55