Greek-Latin Doublet Designations Of Plant Parts In Modern Botanical Terminology

Abstract

The article deals with live issue for terminology of Greco-Latin doublets status in the modern term systems of biological sciences, in particular – in botanic one. Due to historical causes of origin of many biological sciences in the ancient world their terminological systems were formed on the basis of Greek and Latin vocabulary that led to the emergence of Greco-Latin doublet signs of concepts. Owing to development of science it became necessary to use strictly motivated designations, the inner forms of which correspond exactly to their content. Most botanical compound terms have a transparent inner form: the meaning of unknown word can be solved from its word-formative structure by analyzing terminological elements – morphemes and their units that are regularly reproduced in the existent terms or used for creating new terms and have a constant meaning. Frequency terminological elements form a series of terms that are similar in structure and semantics. Terminological elements due to interaction form a complex open formal semantic term system were each element has a special place and constant meaning.

 The purpose of the article is to analyze Greco-Latin terminological elements, which mean the names of plant parts.

By morphemic analyzing it was found that Greek terminological elements signifies parts of the plants are traditionally more productive than Latin, but not all Greek nouns can be used as substantive and be able to stand on its own as a word. Three groups of nouns could be distinguished among them: 1) nouns, which are used as independent term (in transliterated form and with Latin endings) and as part of compound terms and have original meaning (e.g. karpoz); 2) those which keep the original meaning only in terminological elements well as their substantive meaning is transformed (e.g. jullon); 3) those that are not used as independent terms (e.g. juton, rixa, cladoz, anqoz). It was found that Greek nouns of the third type prevail in modern botanical terminology.

Since the article deals with only a small stratum of terminological vocabulary relating to names of plant parts, further study Latin and Greek terminological elements status may be continued in other thematic groups of botanical terminology.