The National and the International in Slavic Linguistic Terminology

The question about the peculiarities of internationalization in different terminological traditions is relevant because the material of the linguistic terminology of the Slavic languages has not been studied. The study aims to identify factors influencing the emergence of international words in terminology, to consider the specific forms of internationalization. The source of the material is Dictionary of Slavonic Linguistic Terminology. The object of the analysis is the thematic groups “Universal Notions”, “The Phonic Aspect of Language”, “Lexicon”, “Parts of Speech”. The material is about 750 lexemes in the eleven Slavic languages, which are further comparatively analyzed with their English, German and French counterparts. Research methods are etymological, quantitative, contrastive, linguogeographical. The first stage is the identification of the specifics of each thematic group, followed by a cross-comparison. The second stage is the identification of the specifics of national terminological traditions and areal analysis. International words make up about 50% of units in the linguistic terminology of Slavic languages (it is less than in the main European languages). Slavic languages have many terms with the national form of expression, which are used along with international words, or instead of their international counterparts. The internationality of linguistic terminology in Slavic languages depends on various factors, mainly, thematic and chronological ones. International words are the ancient tradition terms (synonym, idiom, emphatic, oxytonic ect.) and the terms that emerged in the 20th century (phonology, neutralization, laryngeal, neologism, homophone ect.). They form the thematic group “Universal Notions” (72% international words). The thematic group “Parts of Speech”, on the contrary, consists of terms possessing the national form of expression (25% international words). The groups “The Phonic Aspect of Language” and “Lexicon” (53% and 59% international words) consist of thematic subgroups that have a greater (“Phonology”, “Suprasegmental Phonetics”, “System in the Lexicon”) or smaller (“Lexicography”, “Organs of speech”, “Classification of vowels”) degree of internationalization. The etymological factor shows a greater stability in the Greek origin terms compared to Latin ones: 54% of Greek and 25% of Latin words have no national terms. Cultural and historical factors have split the languages into two areas: East Slavic with Polish and Bulgarian and West Slavic (except for Polish) including Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian. In the first area, the trend towards internationalization is weaker, in the second stronger. The quantitative manifestation of this trend is the difference between the shares of international and national terms that are different in the areas; the qualitative manifestation is the presence of isoglosses of terms that have an exclusively national form of expression.

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