0 INTRODUCTION

4. RHETORIC AND THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IN THE EModE PERIOD
vernacular, this word was adopted into English, enriching the lexicon of the vernacular,
and leading to the status of the EModE period as “central to the growth of the modern
English lexicon” (Bailey 1978: xi). These borrowings were sometimes adopted into
English without making any change, for instance words such as diabetes, virus and
metacarpion. The most general practice, however, was the adaptation of the
morphological characteristics of the word to the vernacular. Therefore, sometimes the
foreign suffix was just dropped, but most of the times of the foreign suffix was replaced
by a native one. For instance, the Latin suffix –atio was replaced by the English –(at)ion,
and the French –ité was replaced by –ity (Gotti 2006: 676).
In spite of being the most frequent strategy to enrich the lexicon, borrowings were
opposed sometimes not only because they might be regarded as a “reproach to the
language” (Jones 1953: 76), but also because readers who were not familiar with Latin
would find them difficult to interpret, that is why they were usually referred to as
“inkhorn terms” or “hard words” (Gotti 2006: 676-677; Jones 1953: 96; Nevalainen 1999:
334, 361; Görlach 1991: 160-161). For this reason, authors borrowing terms from other
languages usually apologized for this practice, and tried to justify these borrowings and
clarify them by explaining the meaning of the loan words or providing a synonym when
they were first introduced in a text. Consider, for instance, the defence of the neologisms
modestie and mansuetude by Sir Thomas Elyot in his Of the knowledg which maketh a
wise man:
In euery of these thinges and their semblable/ is Modestie: which worde
nat beinge knowen in the englisshe tonge/ ne of al them which
vnderstode latin/ except they had radde good autours/they improprely
112