Chapter Eleven
250
1292 “[...] del viscounte qi nous volums qe soit soen countreroullour en tut
soen office.”
1441 “Sir Thomas Stanley, countrollour of oure householde.”Motivated by a similarity-of-function metaphor, the onomasiological
path leading from PROFESSIONS/OCCUPATIONS to COMPUTER HARDWARE/
SOFTWARE has produced in controller the sense of ‘a hardware or software
device that controls a peripheral device or monitors and directs the data
transmission over a local area network’, as in display controller (‘a device
that accepts the character or graphical codes and instructions, and converts
them into a dot-matrix patterns that are displayed on a screen’), or printer
controller.
One more characteristic example of a professional/occupational term
dating from the M.E. period is server, which conveyed the sense of ‘one
who serves or ministers to the requirements of another’ at the very
beginning of its semantic history (and then, an even more specific sense,
referring to ‘an attendant at a meal, one who serves food and drink to those
sitting at table’), which may be illustrated with the following OED
material:
c.1380 “But Crist is among hem as a good servere.”
1460 “Þe seruer hit next of alle kyn men Mays way and stondes by syde.”The similarity (in terms of the relevant conceptual frame) between the
early professional/occupational senses and the figurative computer-
specific sense of this word – which is the rationale behind the
onomasiological process here – is evident from the simplest definition of
the current specialist sense of server: ‘a computer program that accepts
and responds to requests made by another program’, as well as ‘any device
that runs server software’. Also instrumental in the construal of this sense
is the extralinguistic fact that certain servers may be committed to a
specific task – they are called dedicated servers, for example print servers,
file servers, network servers or database servers.
Analogously to the cases of Old English and Middle English senses
presented above, the PROFESSION/OCCUPATION Æ COMPUTER HARDWARE/
SOFTWARE onomasiological directionality in computer terminology may
be seen also in many English vocabulary items that became the names of
professions/occupations during the Early Modern English period.
For example, E.Mod.E. printer (whose early 16th-century senses
included ‘one whose business is the printing of books’, ‘a workman
employed in a printing-office’, as well as ‘an owner of a printing business’
- see the OED) has given rise to the specialist sense of ‘a machine that