CHAPTER ELEVEN
SPECIALIST VOCABULARY:
COGNITIVELY MOTIVATED ONOMASIOLOGY
BEHIND ENGLISH COMPUTER HARDWARE
AND SOFTWARE TERMINOLOGY
PIOTR CYMBALISTA
Introduction: Methods of expanding English specialist
lexicon
Throughout centuries, the necessary expansion of the lexicon of the
specialist (technical, legal, medical, scientific, etc.) vocabulary of English
- as well as the general-application vocabulary in non-specialist registers
of the language, actually – has been effected through not as much
derivation and word-formation as borrowing (Baugh and Cable 2002: 10).
The general applicability of borrowing to the development of Modern
English lexicon, “which has come to rely to a large extent on its facility in
borrowing and assimilating elements from other languages” (Baugh and
Cable 2002: 59), has been indisputably substantial, and can be commented
on as follows:
“Instead of making new words chiefly by the combination of existing
elements, as German does, English has shown a marked tendency to go
outside its own linguistic resources and borrow from other languages. In
the course of centuries of this practice English has built up an unusual
capacity for assimilating outside elements” (Baugh and Cable 2002: 10).With loan words accounting for over 70 per cent of the English corpus
today (Crystal 1997: 27), the predilection for reaching beyond its own
linguistic resources and borrowing from other languages (whether directly
or indirectly, as in the case, for example, of the numerous items of Latin
origin which have entered English via French) has involved not only the