Buletinul Ştiinţific
al
Universităţii „Politehnica” din Timişoara
Tom 5 Seria Limbi moderne 2006
It Runs in the Family. English and European Terminology
Revisited
Sorin Ciutacu 
Abstract
English and the other European languages (especially the Germanic and Romance
languages) tend to evince “un air de famille”. We distinguish the ad-hoc meta-categories of
“hardware’ resemblance (loan-words) and “software” resemblance (loan-translations). The
paper sets out to discuss some recognisable Latin and Greek neologisms, which take up their
place in the data-bases almost as such in different European languages or prompt certain
derivational patterns of term morphology (calques or loan-translations) in Germanic and
Slavic languages revealing the same ”software instructions” harking back to Latin and Greek
models. For this reason languages like English, French, German or Russian seem more and
more European by displaying their overt or covert kinship.
English and the other European languages (especially the Germanic and Romance
languages) tend to evince “un air de famille”. We distinguish the ad-hoc meta-categories of
“hardware’ resemblance (loan-words) and “software” resemblance (loan-translations). The
paper, being meant to be a mere theoretical sketch, sets out to discuss some recognisable Latin
and Greek neologisms, which take up their place in the data-bases almost as such in different
European languages or prompt certain derivational patterns of term morphology (calques or
loan-translations) in Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages revealing the same ”software

Lecturer PhD, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters, History and Theology,
University of the West Timişoara
instructions” harking back to Latin and/or Greek models. For this reason languages like
English, French, German or Russian seem more and more European by displaying their overt
or covert linguistic relatedness.
The phrase “air de famille” belongs to Meillet (Ştefănescu-Drăgăneşti, 1971:158), who
once remarked that the European languages tended to display common features from the
lexical and grammatical point of view. The lectio facilior of this phrase yields the obvious
interpretation according to which all the European languages (with notable exceptions for
blatant reasons) display this “air de famille” because of the common Indo-European origin.
This obvious idea need not be dwelt upon here any longer.
What we want to do is to read the remark in an interesting way for this paper, and
namely the lectio difficilior will sort out the warranted meaning relatedness according to
which resemblance among sundry European languages may be overt due to borrowings (loanwords) or a covert due to hidden borrowings (transpositions/calques/loan-translations). The
sources for this overall resemblance are the classical languages Latin and Greek.
In order to judge the extent of this phenomenon we handle the ad-hoc meta-category of
“hardware resemblance” and “software resemblance”. The terms “hardware” and ” software”
applied to hermeneutic sciences have been prompted by Hofstede’s (1997) phrase “software of
the mind” referring to the inner workings of the mind, that is to the mental programming of
individuals living embedded into a certain culture.
The term resemblance draws heavily on the meta-category put forward by Wittgenstein
(Rosch and Mervis, 1975) used within the concept of “family resemblance”. Rosch and
Mervis (1975) pick up on this concept and make it over into a tenet of cognitivism as they first
applied to the theory of prototypes.
Therefore Rosch and Mervis (1975) read Wittgensteins’ “family resemblance “ as
follows: “Each item has at least one, and probably several elements in common with one or
more items, but no or few, elements are common to all items”.
In our paper “hardware resemblance” designates the phenomena of borrowings or loanwords ultimately stemming from Latin or Greek into languages like English, German, French
or Russian. The list of languages may be extended ad libitum as virtually all the IndoEuropean languages exhibit at least some of the discussed examples. Borrowing occurs as a
chain-event making for a network of kindred terms within the huge terminological data-bases
of scientific languages.
“Software resemblance” covers the phenomena of loan-translations also called
transpositions or calques. Ullmann (1967) used to call them “invisible exports” or also
“invisible imports” as we would rename them because the perspective may work in both ways.
These hidden borrowings reveal the same ultimate sources; these are the same classical Latin
and Greek. The list of European languages yielding arrays of examples may stay the same as
above. The idea of linguistic relatedness here is more difficult to uncover as one transfers
patterns, meanings or concepts belonging to a certain initial mindscape from the classical
languages as an ultimate source, directly or through the intermediary of a language like French
or German into the target language.
According to Stevick (1968:231), “borrowing” by a language is understood to mean
incorporation by a significant segment of the speech population of lexical elements native to a
different language. Thus, a borrowing by English denotes the incorporation of lexical elements
of foreign origin into the speech of a segment of the English-speaking peoples”. In our case,
we refer to the borrowings by English from Latin/Greek directly or through the intermediary
of French.
English has borrowed stems rather then inflections. Borrowings are nothing but
morphemes or morpheme combinations occurring in different discourse contexts pointing out
to their foreign origin and standing out as such at the beginning of their new life in a new
environment. English has taken over nouns, verbs and adjectives from Latin and Greek, but
most of them have undergone some adaptive changes within the new phonetic, morphological
and syntactic environment. Many of them have grown so popular that they have earned their
status of rightful denizens inhabiting the space of English.
So great has the impact of Latin been on English that we can reckon out that about a
quarter of the whole Latin vocabulary has been integrated into English according to the results
published by Greenough and Kittredge quoted by Stevick (1968: 242). The contact of English
with Latin has spanned 1500 years and this does not include the preliminary continental
Germanic period.
As Latin plays an important role in the history of the enrichment of the English
vocabulary, we handle a finer distinction between “learned” and “popular” loanwords of Latin
stock. The learned loanwords sprout forth from a vocabulary layer that holds a higher assigned
status pertaining to science, technology and art. The popular loanwords are the outcome of
individuals, who were keen on spreading the Latin words through their own writings which,
thanks to the printing shops, were circulated and made known to many readers.
If Latin is the main source of inspiration for Modern English vocabulary, being a
continuously used learned language, Greek had to be awakened to life in the Modern Age. We
can also notice that truly many Greek words had been imports via Latin by 1600.
We agree with Stevick (1968:243) that ”Greek was used much in the same way in
French and English and other European languages [...]: telegraph derives from Modern French
télégraphe a compound made in French from Greek morphs; telescope has its origin in Italian
telescopio (Galileo’s term) and Modern Latin telescopium, based on a Greek stem; telepathy
was coined in English in 1882 by F.M. Myers. A word adopted from Greek or coined from
Greek morphs in any of the modern European languages is immediately adaptable in
recognizable orthographic form to the other languages in which the Greek lexical resources
have been exploited”. This “air de famille” becomes manifest and family resemblance can be
easily found by examining the examples above.
Another view put forth by Stevick (1968:243), which we fully endorse, shows that “the
morphological structure of compound and derived word stems” in Greek and Latin essentially
resembles that of modern European languages. Stevick goes on to remark that the boosted
growth of Greek and of Latin, we would add here, was called for by the “unprecedented
demand for terminology that could not be supplied from native language resources if two
practical conditions were to be met: a consistency, a fixity of meaning of constituent
morphemes of the complex terminology, and an immediate intelligibility of the terminology
for speakers of Romance and Germanic languages alike”, who were the bearers of modern
science and scholarship finding themselves in full swing.
Undoubtedly family resemblance, borne out by both hardware and software resemblance
among the European languages, is a feature that has facilitated the advancement and spread of
knowledge by smoothing out terminological rough bits and by pointing out to common
knowledge patterns coming to the fore in common compounding and derivation patterns
drawing upon classical Greek and Latin models across all sorts of European languages.
Let us now turn to some examples of hardware resemblances. Latin exportum yields a
series of similar terms in different European languages: export in English, export in French,
Export in German. Within the same contextual field of economy, all these languages share,
more or less, the same term with the same concept. In terminology, Humboldt’s biuniqueness
principle is striven for by all term-concept pairs. Thus: theoretically, we have one term for one
concept and the other way round. That is: no synonyms.
Things are unfortunately far from being perfect in terminology. In German, Export has a
strong synonymous competitor: Ausfuhr. Generally, in such cases, some differentiation of any
kind, usually of style or register is bound to crop up. The autochthonous English word buyer is
rivalled by the French stem synonymous word purchaser. In contracts, the French stem word
purchaser is preferred because of its formality. Seller and vendor, though synonyms with
Germanic and Latin stems respectively, turn up in different context. Seller is generic and may
appear in legal texts, whereas vendor also spelt as vender, seems to be restricted to the concept
of seller of lesser value goods. Seller is a perfect antonym for buyer, while vendor is not a
perfect antonym for purchaser. Vend is the underlying verb, which also grants hardware
resemblance to the term vender/vendor compared to the host of its Romance counterpart terms
based on Latin vendere with the same concept from the field of economy.
Software resemblance is shown forth by phonetically dissimilar terms, but with similar
or identical morphological compounding or derivational patterns or even syntactic patterns
and with corresponding concepts that evince at least partial likeness. In the case of
terminological loan-translations, one imports or adds concepts to a certain term.
If English gospel comes from an Old English calque of classical Greek evaggelion
(which is itself a loan-translation of Hebrew m’lk) meaning literally “good tidings”, and
English Almighty comes about as a software resemblance calque of the Latin Omnipotens, we
can say that both these pairs share the same concept in the field of divinity studies. The same
can be said of the German “Der Allmaechtige” which evinces the same morphological pattern
copying the Latin morphemes omni and potens.
French gratte-ciel and Italian gratta-cielo copy out some syntactic features of English
sky-scraper. German Wolkenkratzer and Dutch wolkenkrabber come closer to the English
morphological patterning for the field of architecture. Obviously, all the calques sharing this
software resemblance have the same concept. In this case, the examples do not hark back to
classical languages.
In German, we find a finer distinction of this software resemblance meta-category and
namely there are: Lehnuebersetzungen, Lehnuebertragungen and Lehnschopfungen. Ausdruck
stems from Latin expressio in philosophical language and is deemed to be a Lehnuebersetzung
(loan-translation): aus corresponds to Latin ex- and Druck to Latin pressio from premere. In
Russian the counterpart term is izraženije. This procedure is widely used by most Germanic
languages and German is their model even though Latin is sometimes the ultimate source of
inspiration.
The example from above: Wolkenkratzer is deemed to be a Lehnuebertragung (loantransfer) being an echo of English sky-scraper as I said in the previous paragraphs.
An example of Lehnschoepfung (loan-creation) is Kraftwagen which draws upon the
French term structure automobile which in its turn harks back to the Greek and Latin elements.
Obviously, all the terms in the European languages having the form automobile and the
German term share the same concept within the same technological field.
If the contexts or fields are different, the software resemblance terms that seem to share
a morphological pattern may have different concepts. For example, English uphold, German
aufhalten and Dutch ophouden, even if these terms may suggest a common Latin pattern
sustinere, fail to share the same concept.
In the paragraphs from above we have seen that Latin and Greek prompt most of the
family resemblance cases that make for an “air de famille” of the European languages. Latin
can act also as an intermediary for ultimate Greek sources. French can be the source for many
terms, but it can very often be just an intermediary link for ultimate Latin origins. Greek is a
very frequent model and it may sometimes act as an intermediary language for Hebrew.
German has been the paragon for many Germanic tongues; however many software
resemblance cases can be more subtly traced back to Latin.
Both hardware and software resemblance cases ensure the common denominator of the
relatedness criterion among the European languages, no matter how fuzzy this criterion may
seem.
References
1. Hofstede G., Cultures and Organizations. Software of the Mind, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997
2. Rosch E., Mervis C.B., “Family resemblances: studies in the internal structure of categories”, Cognitive
Psychology, 7/1975: 573-605
3. Ştefănescu-Drăgăneşti V., Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Germanic Languages, Bucuresti:
Centrul de Multiplicare al Universităţii din Bucuresti, 1971
4. Stevick, R.D., English and Its History. The Evolution of a Language, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1968
5. Ullmann, S., Semantics. An Introduction to the Science of Meaning, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967