Chapter Twenty
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“a condition when too much urine is produced (diabetes) and the urine is
like honey (mellitus)”. These are not salient features of the disease entity
in question relative to current knowledge. Moreover, the headword
diabetes also appears in English in the name of a condition (diabetes
insipidus) that is unrelated to glucose levels in the body but is also
associated with overproduction of urine. Such time-honoured terms carry
little concept-salient information.
The non-transparency of such terms to the professional user needs to
be distinguished from their intelligibility in non-professional discourse,
such as that of patients, to whom neoclassical compounds, such as
cerebrosidase deficiency, whose lexical meaning carries much more
relevant information to the professional user, are opaque.
Conclusions
The above presentation and discussion of various categories of low-
salience terms together with the proposed reasons for their persistence
entails a number of conclusions. The survival of eponymic terms and the
emergence and persistence of terms with alphanumeric symbols signifies
that, in terminology, conceptual content is paramount over terminological
compositionality and that, accordingly, the morphemic “dress” is of
secondary importance. This situation can apparently only obtain in the
presence of a definition that is stable at a given point in time. Definitional
stability seems to have been generally underplayed by advocates of
cognitive linguistic approaches to terminology. It is certainly true that the
concepts tied to terms evolve in time (the replacement of transparent terms
with those containing alphanumeric symbols furnishes prime evidence of
that!) and that, as we know from the literature, terms in texts can express
meanings motivated by the authors’ experience and intentions rather than
by accepted definitions (Sager 1990, Temmerman 2000). Among Polish
writers, Gajda (1990: 41) stresses that terms in texts enter into relations
with other words and express those aspects of their concepts that are
emphasised in accordance with the cognitive orientation of the author and
his/her targeting of a particular type of recipient, and Lukszyn (1991: 83)
states that terms in texts express conceptual variants of an invariant
represented by the dictionary definition.
Conceptual change does not necessarily produce terminological
change: our knowledge about the causes (aetiology) and pathological
mechanisms of diabetes mellitus is much more advanced in comparison to
that possessed by ancient medical practitioners, but the English name for
this disease has remained unchanged (admittedly, as an umbrella term—