The International Terminological Key - universala esperanto

It is for that reason that we also estimate that one should not try – as purists
do – to position the function of technical or scientific terminology exclusively
on the medium level, i.e. everyday language, giving it a task involving
stringent exigencies for which it is not really adaptable and would therefore
become totally overloaded. Let's remind ourselves of Professor FELBER's
remark, that the usual language, the socioglot, contains only some
thousands of word elements – of which a good part is used up by purely
grammatical elements (pronouns, prepositions, case endings) – while the
normoglot, used by scientists and engineers, demands several millions of
words for its exacting purposes. And that is not just a simple rhetorical or
academic expression of opinion, but a very important assessment, having
hard practical and cogent consequences for modern national and international
communication, for the exchange of knowledge and know-how.
Some people will object that non-Western nations like Indonesia or Japan
are doing quite well, in spite of their lacking a special thesaurus to draw
from, comparable to our Greek and Latin. Sure, they are getting along in our
technological age, but not quite well ! They are constantly troubled by many
linguistic ailments in trying to keep up with Western progress. To cite just
two: long word chains and masses of homonyms. Whoever doubts the
inherent necessity of a separate normoglot for sciences and technology
should read at least some of the enlightening monographs by non-
Westerners, referred to in footnote 7.
To give a more precise idea, if we take the well known French encyclopedia
LAROUSSE from the seventies, in 10 volumes – already a good thirty years
back! – it lists about 160.000 articles, in effect just as many key concepts.
But apart from this “bird's eye view” there existed in France during the same
epoch at least two specialized comprehensive dictionaries, one about
medicine and biology, the other about industrial techniques, which each
numbered 150.000 terms. A German estimate at that time reached 4½
million terms for chemical substances alone! These numbers never ceased to
increase, ever more rapidly. On the other hand one enumerates the
individual disciplines (sciences, crafts, arts, professions) at several hundred.
Let us attribute to most of them a relatively modest amount of some hundred
concepts/terms, admitting that a certain percentage of terms overlap. Well,
even then we are confronted, in any given “important” language, by a total
going into several millions... 9 In comparison, a fairly recent version of the
otherwise colossal Oxford English Dictionary listed "only“ 171,000 definite
articles...
So, how would one go about using only common wording to name all and
every chemical substance, all and every species of insect as well as their
countless taxons, all and every anatomical constituent of the human body,
all and every piece of a colossal particle accelerator, all and every notion
9. According to R. Kocourek in La langue française de la technique et de la science – Brandstetter
Verlag, Wiesbaden 1982.
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