0 INTRODUCTION

4. RHETORIC AND THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IN THE EModE PERIOD
have the same shade of meaning as nowadays. At that period, they only meant lack of
eloquence.
Both Jones (1953) and Gotti (2006) have written extensively on the English lack
of vocabulary to express all the new ideas appearing at such a prolific time as the
Renaissance. This lack of words was evident especially in the “names of art,” that is,
“technical terms that made up the basic lexis of a subject” (Gotti 2006: 657). Since in the
past all knowledge was written in Latin, it is not surprising that the vernacular lacked
specialized terminology. Furthermore, specialists also criticized the polysemy of many
English words that rendered the texts ambiguous. Therefore, obstacles such as
uneloquence, especially in technical writings, and polysemy that led to ambiguity needed
to be overcome in order to make the English language fit for any register.
4.3.2.2. English made eloquent
Once English was considered to be inadequate to express certain aspects of learning and
knowledge, it was improved by increasing the number of terms of art and also by
reducing the polysemy of words that led to ambiguity in texts (Gotti 2006: 675, 2011:
207). In order to achieve eloquence, two different strategies were followed. Specialists
could either borrow new terms from other languages, especially Latin, or use the
resources of the native tongue, creating a new word or adding a specialized meaning to a
word already existing in the English lexicon.
Gotti (2006) argues that borrowing from Latin was, by far, the most frequent
strategy. Thus, when a writer or a translator faced a word with no equivalent in the
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