The International Terminological Key - universala esperanto

striking model of this crippling disease, listing no less than 300,000
abbreviations of the kind AIDS, ADN, LSO, FBI, ASCII, VHS, DOS etc. And the
compilers explicitly admit not having had the ambition of being
comprehensive! Thus, it becomes understandable that specialists (again) try
to row counter-current, forcing at least some meaning into their labels, even
if purely artificially, so they can be more easily remembered. A good example,
familiar to just about everyone nowadays, is the code-word BASIC from
informatics, imagined to be short for “Beginners All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code”. Another is WORM, forcefully invented for “write once, read
many”. Other examples can be found in the names given to satellites and
space probes, representing at the same time a meaningful (or well known)
name and an acronym – perhaps an unconscious reaction to the onslaught
of anarchy.
A significant citation – illustrative of this internal weakness of all languages
in general and English in particular – with regard to the information
explosion, is the opinion of Professor H. FELBER, 3 former director of the
international centre for terminology INFOTERM in Vienna, founded by
UNESCO, which we shall come back to later: 4
“If it cannot be accomplished in the coming decades that the tools of terminology
(terminological principles, methods and formats) are fully applied on both
national and international levels, so that terminologies become reliable, then
serious difficulties in regard to subject com-munication can occur, and even a
complete breakdown of it can be expected. This situation is mainly due to the
rapid progress achieved in all areas of human activity which caused an
abundance of new concepts. These concepts, however, have to be expressed by a
very limited number of terms and possible combinations of term elements in the
various languages. These tremendous dynamics within term formation and
evolution are in contrast to a static stock of word elements from which terms can
actually be formed. The roots that are available in the various languages amount
to a few thousand, while the number of concepts known can only be expressed in
millions. The limits of assigning terms to concepts in an unambiguous way are
reached very quickly if the development proceeds further at such a rate.”
Who will contest this gloomy diagnosis, coming from such a renowned
expert? The consequences are serious, as much for the international
academic community as for the ethnic languages taken separately, and even
for... the so-called artificial languages studied by interlinguistics. (As a
matter of fact, terminology and interlinguistics have much in common; but
let this topic rest for the moment.)
Therefore we assert that information and mutual comprehension on the
highest intellectual level – say: university status – will become impossible to
realize in the near (?) future, if this level keeps making use of “natural”
tongues, especially of English, already in free fall towards complete chaos. In
3. Author of, among others, the Terminology Manual – International Information Centre for
Terminology, Paris 1984.
4. In his introduction to a brochure about the activities and aims of said organization: Infoterm – Ten
years of activities – Austrian Standards Institute, Vienna 1982.
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