Timely quesetions on scientific terminology

Abstract

Some of the timely questions on scientific terminology are discussed. The questions arise partly within a language, partly on an international level. The former centres around the fact that the increase in the number of scientific notions - mainly in the technical field - is much faster than the development of word-formation in any language. Thus, the applied word does not very often correctly cover the notion which gravely affects the elaboration of the notion itself as well as that of the concerned circle of problems. On an international level, a characteristic manifestation of the problem is the mixture of the technical terms in various languages within the scientific stock of words of a language. The author finds that one of the most important - but by far not the only - solutions of the problem of scientific terminology is the substitution of specialization by the evaluation of general technical knowledge (polyhistorians).