The system of terminology: history and science

Abstract

The talk was centred around terms as linguistic units. An overview of scientific literature in 1920-2020 on the topic was proposed. As is clear from the analysis, the key authors pertaining to the domain come from Russia and former Soviet countries. The biggest figure and the founding father of the Russian and Soviet terminology schools was Dmitriy Semyonovich Lotte (b. 1898- d. 1950). He headed the Union’s governmental chamber responsible for systematising and classifying the abundant terminological lexis that existed in branches of industry at the time. His main books were published in 1933-1961, his work “The basics of compiling scientific and technical terminological systems” being the classic guide for terminologists of all time. Historically, it was terminology for machine- and automobile-building that initiated developing a scientific method to deal with nomenclatures and thematic words at large. As of today, the overwhelming majority of scientific disciplines and applied studies have formed their respective terminological vocabulary and boast complete systems. Modern authors contributing to the advancement of terminology as a science are digging into the matters of digitising various corpora and scrutinising the psycholinguistic layers of terms.