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originate in cultural studies, which at a quick glance would seem improper to our research
background. Nevertheless, language not only “… gives meaning to material objects and
social practices that are brought into view and made intelligible to us”, but it is equally “the
medium for the formation and transfer of values, meanings and forms of knowledge” and
“…the privileged medium in which […] meanings are […] communicated” (Barker 2005: 88).
Hence, our inspiration in attributing them a linguistic bias.
Paraphrasing Barker (2005: vii) who assigns the following three meanings to hybridity,
we shall admit that identity as well as alterity may and will, in our current interpretation,
stand for “(a) discursive formations, (b) frameworks for intercultural communication” and
“(c) agenda for research”, i.e., linguistic research, in our case. Historically understood, all the
three concepts have contributed to the development of vocabularies, specialist terminologies
included.
Defined as “… the affirmation of those who we are by contrasting nearly every element
of our way of life with that of the others” (Voestermans 1991: 220), in what follows, identity
will apply to eponyms of English extraction, for irrespective of the geographical varieties of
English (be it British or American), scientific English shows but fuzzy boundaries.
Alterity, which “came to be broadly defined as discourse on the otherness of people,
particularly outside one’s domestic ken” (Voestermans 1991: 220), will refer to all those
eponymisms originating in other cultures but which were adopted by English as well.
“At its core, hybridity involves the mixing together of previously discrete cultural
elements to create new meanings and identities” (Barker 2004: 89). We share Kraidy’s (2005:
1) opinion that “hybridization is one of the emblematic notions of our era […] which
captures the spirit of the time”. Although most frequently, hybridity refers to culture, as we
use it from now on, it relates to language, in general and to field-specific vocabularies in
particular.
We aim to show that eponymy is transcultural and it etymologically reveals three main
classes of eponymisms, viz., those originating in the names of famous native eponymists, or
in the names of those coming from other cultures or in several types of associations between
eponymists of the otherness and those of the native scientific background.
2. Materials and methods
To make a comprehensive inventory of chemical eponyms, four English volumes
(Holtzclaw and Robinson, 1988a, Holtzclaw and Robinson, 1988b, Pauling, 1964, Chang,
1984) were scanned and a list of such terms was drawn which resulted in a corpus of fieldspecific
items to include over 400 illustrations.
They were etymologically classified to comply with the key words of the current
approach. The classification considered the structure of eponyms as an element of particular
interest. This is due to the fact that in the case of set phrases their structure is always the
same, i.e., chemists will always use the Moseley diagram, the Parkes process or the rule of
Dulong and Petit and never in any other word sequence. It is worthwhile pointing to the
practicality of the corpus which was not designed for this research exclusively. In addition to
its being useful for an intercultural analysis, our multipurpose corpus of chemical eponyms
will serve for lexicological, lexicographical and translational research, teaching and
evaluating purposes.
3. Findings
The investigation of the chemical eponyms showed common structural features,
irrespective of their originating in English or other languages. Personal names may be used
as one-word terms or as combinations including one or more personal names and at least
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