Филологические науки/3.Теоретические и методологические проблемы  исследования языка

Lekhkun G.V.

Department of Foreign Languages

Bukovinian State Medical University, Chernivtsi, Ukraine

Medical Dictionary with Proper Names

In modern world dictionaries are often the main source of important data necessary for various objectives: educational, scientific, cognitive and even informational. Well-planned and thoroughly worked up and formulated dictionary can contain those very facts that not only give the general understanding of some issues but also summarize and generalize our idea about the object or notion of study. Rapid development of science and technology leads to the appearance of new concepts in the surrounding reality. All of them need to be named and placed somewhere in order to keep the hierarchy of the world, its intrinsic structure and arrangement.

Compiling a dictionary takes much time and requires a number of human resources. Constant changes greatly influence all spheres of human activity which are so much interconnected and interdependent that sometimes it is difficult or even impossible to distinguish between two phenomena or notions and to differentiate between them. That’s why the definition given in the dictionary entry should be accurate and at the same time capacious, comprising key issues of the notion.

In the future we are going to compile a dictionary of medical terms with onymic components that’s why at present the priority of our research is to single out criteria of compiling dictionary entries and to determine principles of selecting information that should be included in the explanation of a term.

Proper names in medical science are universal units understandable for different groups of users: researchers, doctors, students and often even for patients. But in many cases one can come across the units which are not frequently used or some other synonymic term is more common in usage; the vast majority of these terms are going to be described in this dictionary and since there are no similar generalized dictionaries of medical proper terms, it indicates the novelty of the given research.

Dictionaries of branch terminologies need to be constantly renewed because they “get old” very fast. New medicines with special trade mark names, modern diagnostic devices and techniques periodically appear in the field of medicine and thus, they should be included into the studied vocabulary as units of some terminology. The work upon compiling dictionaries should not be stopped, it is a kind of an endless process which can provide communication between professional groups of doctors, facilitate the scientific dialogue all over the world and show the contribution of nations into the world’s scientific progress. It illustrates the topicality of this article and confirms the necessity of continuation of work in this direction.

Terminology as an independent linguistic field is investigated in the works of Sayce A.H., Kageura K., Temmerman R., Heine B., Narrog H. Much attention to dictionaries compilation was paid in the works of B. Shunevych, Hawel Z.S., Griniov S.V., Ali Al-Kasimi. Verification of onymic medical terms was based on general medical dictionaries: Illustrated Medical Dorland’s Encyclopedia, Medical Encyclopedia and Guide to Family Health, Dictionaries of Modern Medicine, Medical Eponyms; and those which contain specific branch terminological units: The Encyclopedia of Cosmetic and Plastic Surgery, names of syndromes and symptoms.

This paper aims at description of the main principles of dictionary entries compilation when verifying medical terms with proper names. The objectives of the research are as follows: 1) explore the types of onymic terminal units in the medical terminology; 2) determine what terms should be included into the dictionary; 3) arrange the information necessary for the definition of the term; 3) create a dictionary entry taking into account the type of proper name used in the term.

Main part and results of the research. The dictionary of medical terms is of course a specialized dictionary. According to Z. Hawel “A specialized dictionary deals with one sector of the lexicon such as medical, chemical, or philosophical terms. Such a dictionary focuses on linguistic and factual matters relating to specific subject fields. It may have a relatively broad converge, in that it covers several subject fields such as science and technology (a multifield dictionary), or either coverage may be more narrow, in that they cover one particular subject field such as dermatology / plastic surgery (a single-field dictionary) or even a specific sub-field such as biological chemistry (a subfield dictionary). In this respect, we may state that specialized dictionaries may be maximizing dictionaries, i.e. they attempt to achieve comprehensive coverage of the terms in the subject field concerned, or they may be minimizing dictionaries, i.e. they attempt to cover only a limited number of the specialized vocabulary concerned” [1].

Thus, it is easily seen that specialized dictionary has an encyclopedic nature. It means that it includes much additional information important for understanding and use of terminology in any specific field. The most important purpose of compiling specialized dictionaries is an attempt to verify and arrange the most commonly used terminology of some specific field, to give adequate and correct definitions of the terms, to start the process of supplying communication between specialists with unique terminological units, to provide standardization and unification of terms according to national and international demands in order to create a systematized information about medical terminology. It gives the possibility to make these terms a constituent part of scientific achievements in the field of medicine.

Encyclopedic dictionaries also include such items as illustrations, special lists, and historical data, and biographical information, names of persons, places and literary works which are characterized by extensive treatment of facts [1].

All the definitions of the above-mentioned proper components of medical terms are taken from the works in onomastic research [2; 3]. The biggest group of proper names in medical terms is represented by eponyms. An eponym can be either an item which provides a name-source for a particular place, tribe, era, discovery, or other item to be named, or it can also be an item which acts as a name-recipient” [3]. It is important to give some information about the author of any symptom or disorder, this data should be suggested separately from the entry itself since the definition may be considered as a completely medical notion in this case and bibliographic encyclopedic information is just a kind of additional cognitive note, e.g.:

Down syndrome (DS) or Down’s syndrome – is a genetic disorder caused by the presence of all or part of a third copy of chromosome 21. It is typically associated with physical growth delays, characteristic facial features, and mild to moderate intellectual disability; also known as trisomy 21. [John Langdon Down, the British doctor who fully described the syndrome in 1866.]

There are many eponymic terms composed of two or more proper names: Aarskog-Scott syndrome – is a rare disease inherited as autosomal dominant or X-linked and characterized by short stature, facial abnormalities, skeletal and genital anomalies; also known as the Aarskog syndrome, faciodigitogenital syndrome, shawl scrotum syndrome and faciogenital dysplasia. [The syndrome is named for Dagfinn, a Norwegian pediatrician and human geneticist who first described it in 1970, and for Charles I. Scott, Jr., an American medical geneticist who independently described the syndrome in 1971.] Here the additional information (i.e. synonymic row) shows that the main figure in the description of this syndrome is the first eponym so the description reflects this information about both physicians.

Conclusions. An encyclopedic dictionary of medical terms with onymic component should be primarily focused on terms themselves and their definitions to give readers the main idea about notions and phenomena they explore; provide necessary information concerning certain lexical unit. Most of the terms are eponyms, i.e. names of people (scientists, patients) constitute the basis for such a term. All the terms are going to be described in the dictionary of medical terms with proper names.

References:

1. Hawel Z.S. A Study on the Approaches of Classifying Dictionaries with an Evaluation of Dictionaries Used by the Students of Translation / Zeineb Sami Hawel // Journal of the College of Arts. – University of Basrah. – 2007. – № 43.

2. Bugybayeva Z. Word-formation in Kazakh toponyms / Z. Bugybayeva, A. Omarova, Z. Sydykova and others // Life Science Journal. – Almaty, 2014. – № 11(6). – P. 516–521.

3. Подольская Н. В. Словарь ономастической терминологии / Н. В. Подольская. – М. : Наука, 1988. – 188 с.

4. Ілюстрований медичний словник Дорланда / [ред. Павло Джуль, Борис Зіменковський]. – У 2 томах. – Львів: “Наутілус”, 2002. – 2688 с.

5. Hornby A. S. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English / Hornby A. S., Crowther I. – Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1998. – 1430 p.