bosiyu
Passage 3Every profession or trade, every art,
and every science has its technical vocabulary, the function of which is partly
to designate things or processes which have no names in ordinary English, and
partly to secure greater exactness in nomenclature (命名法) Such special dialects,
or jargons, are necessary in technical discussion of any kind' Being universally
understood by the devotees of the particular science or art, they have the
precision of a mathematical formula Besides, they save time, for it is much more
economical to name a process than to describe it. Thousands of these technical
terms are very properly 'included in every large dictionary, yet, as a whole,
they are rather on the outskirts of the English language than actually within
its borders.
Different occupations, however, differ wide1y in the character
of their special, vocabularies. In trades and handicrafts and other vocations,
such as farming and fishing, that have occupied great numbers of men from remote
times, the technical vocabulary is very old. It consists largely of native
words, or of borrowed words that have worked themselves into the very fiber of
our language. Hence, though high1y technical in many particulars, these
vocabularies are more familiar in sound, and more generally understood than most
other technicalities. The special dialects of law, medicine, divinity, and
philosophy have also, in their older strata, become pretty familiar to
cultivated person, and have contributed much to the popular vocabulary. Yet,
every vocation still possesses a large body of technical terms that remain
essentially foreign, even to educated speech. And the proportion has been much
increased in the last fifty years, particularly in the various departments of
natural and political science and in the mechanic arts. Here new terms are
coined with the greatest freedom, and abandoned with indifference when they have
served their turn. Most of the new coinages are confined to special discussions
and seldom get into general literature conversation. Yet no profession is
nowadays, as an professions once were, a closed guild (行会). The lawyer, the
physician, the man of science, and the cleric (教士的 ) associates freely with his
fellow creatures, and docs not meet them in a merely professional way.
Furthermore, what is called popular science makes everybody acquainted with
modern views and recent discoveries. Any important experiment, though made in a
remote or provincial laboratory, is at once reported in the newspapers, and
everybody is soon talking about it ---- as in the case of the Roentgen rays and
wireless telegraphy. Thus, our common speech is always taking up new technical
terms and making them commonplace.