REFLECTIONS, SUGGESTIONS
LET US CONSIDER THE NEOLOGISM ATMINTYNAS
Often a new term suddenly comes into widespread use, as if some dam had burst. This happens when the lack of a term has for some time hindered many people from expressing their thoughts concisely and precisely, becoming a real burden. For example, could we really have called the mass media by the term mass media? The good term žiniasklaida caught on at once. Unfortunately, people often try to do something similar without giving it much thought, even though we are not under such pressure.
Was it worth replacing the computing term atmintis with atmintinė? Hardly. In Lithuanian, atmintinė is only a booklet or document containing brief information about something. (Is it really intended to do away altogether with the word’s former meaning, assigning it solely to the term atmena?) Of course, this meaning of the term could be modified slightly or extended—for instance, to include a notebook for (temporary) notes or jottings. Not much more. So in computing, too, the term can refer only to things with similar characteristics, not to a massive-capacity primary storage device or an even larger-capacity secondary storage device. Well, of course, the aim is to distinguish very clearly the storage device itself from its function—storage. The intention is not blameworthy, but “whatever you do, do it well.”
A much better term for briefly naming a storage device of substantial capacity would be atmintynas. Its specific terms would be: primary atmintynas, secondary atmintynas, magnetic atmintynas, regenerative atmintynas, random-access (RAM) atmintynas, permanent atmintynas, operational atmintynas, and so on. The primary atmintynas would consist of memory or atmintynas modules. The terms permanent memory, operational memory, virtual memory would, naturally, retain their function.
We need to conserve our supply of words, yet we keep wasting them carelessly and recklessly. We never stop to consider whether a proposed new term is truly impeccable, or whether its structure is such that it would perfectly name an entirely different concept. Regardless of such considerations, it keeps happening that
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