Chapter Eleven
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perplexing points of the new Christian religion, or the ever more and more
sophisticated scientific and technological developments.
At this point, it is worth emphasizing that the majority of the loans in
the English vocabulary have originated from Greek, Latin, French and
New Latin,^6 i.e. the mixture of Latin and Greek which was the lingua
franca during the Mediaeval and Renaissance periods (Kastovsky 2009: 1).
In consequence, the preponderance of Greek and Latin (as well as New
Latin) has also resulted in the hybrid formation phenomenon which may
be generally called (in Lüdeling’s 2006 terminology) neoclassical word-
formation, or – with more specific reference – neoclassical compounding
(ibid.).
The reason why so much space has been devoted in the foregoing
section to neoclassical compounding – in contravention of ten Hacken’s
(2012: 78) somewhat belittling comment to the effect that neoclassical
word-formation “is a relatively peripheral phenomenon in English and
many other languages”^7 – is that it must be acknowledged as “a productive
word formation process in the sense of frequently producing new words,
mainly scientific terms”^8 (Panovcová 2012: 31). In the light of the
linguistic evidence – including the selective examples quoted above, as
well as many other specialist vocabulary items, such as cyberphobia,
electromyography, phonocardiogram, photostethoscope, rhinomanometer,
virologist, etc., to name but a few (ibid.) – it may be easily postulated that
“[t]he use of neoclassical elements is a characteristic of many scientific or
technical lexical items” (Montero-Fleta 2013: 1).
Consequently, neoclassical compounding may be nonetheless
considered such a significant and typical means of answering the
onomasiological needs arising within the specialist lexicon of a language
that some researchers make reference to this particular application in the
very definition of this particular compounding phenomenon. The case in
point is Iacobini (2015: 1662), who introduces the term by stating that
“neoclassical compounding is the word-formation pattern which uses
combining forms [...] taken from Latin and Ancient Greek with the
particular aim of coining technical and scientific terms”.
The above-formulated comments may be concluded by stating that
neoclassical compounding has definitely been one of the most productive
(^6) New Latin may be also referred to as Neo-Latin – for example, as in Kastovsky
(2009).
(^7) Which is nonetheless true if one is to consider neoclassical compounding against
the massive background of other word-formation mechanisms native to English (or
the other languages concerned).
(^8) Emphasis mine.