The International Terminological Key - universala esperanto

This is particularly true for the domains of zoology and botany, in which
graeco-latin names play a central part, but where these names are so
incredibly chaotic and their taxonomic framework anything but stable and
uniform, that they only succeed in producing endless discussions and
headaches. The problem of linguistic standardization is thus about the most
poignant in the biological science fields, and there also the most clearly
recognizable.
The wisdom of Prof. WERNER clearly penetrates the root of this matter,
where he states in the Introduction to his Die Benennung [see note 17]:
“One should as far as possible make the presently available names [of
living creatures and their organs] more understandable without putting
their taxonomic coherence in danger and at the same time create a basis
for precisely formulating new meaningful names. No one has the right to
demand from experts and other users of these names a complete study of
ancient or foreign languages. Instead of referring them to voluminous
dictionaries and grammars, one would do better to create new handbooks
and dictionaries reduced to the language material really needed [in their
disciplines]. The linguistic competence acquired in this manner would in
no way be detrimental to the taxonomist, while being actually very useful
to non-specialists. That linguistic basis should not of course be limited to
a mere list of names ! What we need is a coherent scientific system, in
which the individual terms can [clearly] relate to each other.”
Unwittingly this German biologist well rephrases the solution eagerly sought
by our pioneers. What they were dealing with is in essence the old problem,
known to every living language, of the assimilation of names and words
imported from an outside culture ― loanwords. Such an imported product
carries with it not only its meaning but also its appearance, modelled after
the specific criteria of the source language, i.e. according to a spelling
(usually) reflecting neither the pronunciation rules nor the morphology
(structure) of the target language. This awkward situation is even more
striking when the source language is of the inflexional type and the target
one of the agglutinative type, or vice versa; not to mention non-alphabetic
languages.
What, for instance, to do in French or Dutch or Italian or Polish or ... with
the inevitable word-flow from the modern computing business? Many will
find homemade transformations for “data” like Daten in German, or données
in French. For others will be found a home-made equivalent like estampador
in Spanish for printer. But how many foreigners let themselves be nicely
naturalized in this way? The famous word pipeline of the oil industry in
France, well structured inside, never got around to become oléoduct, despite
French government (!) efforts, but remained pipe-line, while the sound
bouteur never got around to replace the omnipresent bulldozer. Now, since
we have to deal here especially with Latin (or latinized) word stems, let's take
the example of Dutch, which never got around to choose among plurals for
loans like sacralia, catalogi, hominidae, coronae, ... and also uses
indifferently sacraliën, catalogussen, hominiden, corona's. All the great
languages surely have some of those Latin lice on their furs.
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