The terminology of many sciences and other academic disciplines still includes terms derived from Greek and Latin, and sometimes there has been a continuous development of the discipline and its terminology from antiquity to the present day. These two volumes examine such developments, spanning a wide range of disciplines and periods.
The preface of Coming to Terms explains that the book aims to look beyond traditional questions of morphology and usage to questions about the strategic and aesthetic reasons for the development of terminologies. In the introduction Asper sketches some of the different approaches that the contributors adopt, before briefly summarising their papers.
F. Schironi's ‘The Language of Astronomy’ tackles the terminology of the astronomical sphere and fixed stars from the beginnings to Ptolemy, highlighting contrasts between ancient and modern terminology. For example, ancient terminology generally related to what was visible to the observer (e.g. compare the ‘zodiacal circle’ of the Greeks with the more recherché modern term ‘ecliptic circle’); and terminology reflects the interests of the users: for example, the Greeks created precise terminology for the risings and settings of stars – important for farmers and seafarers –, but these are of little interest to modern astronomers.
C. Roby's ‘Terminology in the Wild: Enactive Meaning-Making in the Roman Surveyors’ uses cognitive science theories of embodiment and enaction in the discussion of the writings and the practice of ancient surveyors. Agrimensorial works display some tension between writers who wanted stable, precise terminology and those who acknowledged the ever-changing conditions of the surveyors’ work, with changing laws, changing landscapes and local variations, which required surveyors to navigate the complexities of ever-shifting terminologies.
Asper's ‘Rich Names: Implications of Terminology in Ancient Greek Rhetoric, Medicine, and Siege Lore’ explores the contrast between ‘rich’ and ‘lean’ terminologies in the ancient world, taking examples firstly from mathematics, where he contrasts the ‘lean’ terminology of Euclidean geometry, with straightforward terms (e.g. euthugrammon, ‘rectilinear’), and more colourful, ‘rich’ terminology, such as the ‘ludic’ naming of Eratosthenes’ method for finding prime numbers as the ‘sieve’ (koskinon). He then looks at debates about ‘lean’ and ‘rich’ terminology in rhetorical theory and medicine, before turning to works on siege technology, where technical terms were often left undefined (perhaps because the works were written for experts) and various strategies were adopted to name siege-engines, including naming them after the inventor or the place of origin.
S. Föllinger, in ‘The Problem of Biological Terminology in Aristotle's De generatione animalium (On Generation of Animals)’ tackles this late work of Aristotle that ambitiously attempts a unified explanation of animal reproduction and inheritance. She shows how Aristotle adapted theoretical terms used elsewhere by himself or other writers, or terms from ordinary language, often with a change of meaning that may or may not be explicitly signalled; and how he also used metaphor, comparison and analogy.
Two contributions address the well-known problem that Aristotle is keen on exact terminology, creating many new terms, yet is often imprecise in his use of terms. L.D. Marsh's ‘Coming to Terms with Aristotle: Technical Terminology in the Poetics and Beyond’ adopts the approach assuming that there was a technical meaning of certain terms familiar to Aristotle's audience, though not to us, and applies it to mimesis: he proposes a new definition of mimēsis, that it is ‘1. … a syllogistic arrangement of individual imitations termed μιμήματα. 2. If this syllogistic arrangement of imitations can be adequately followed and predicted, it produces the pleasure of understanding and learning. 3. An individual imitation alone cannot be a mimēsis, and is not [?] termed a μίμημα’ (p. 121). He argues that this sense is used consistently within the Poetics.
A.-M. Gasser's ‘Form, Terminology, and Clarity in Aristotle’ starts by looking at what Aristotle has to say about onomata in the Rhetoric, the Poetics and the Organon: he envisages a continuous spectrum from poetry, via rhetoric, to geometry and other sciences; and she postulates that Aristotle's treatises mainly come between rhetoric and geometry on this spectrum. Clarity is always important, common words are used everywhere, but there is variation in the use of strange words (xenika), standard in poetry, but absent at the other end of the spectrum. Then Gasser describes the various ways in which Aristotle forms his terms, drawing particular attention to his frequent construction of new phrases out of ordinary terms, particularly phrases that are semantically empty: for instance, in the Poetics he distinguishes three kinds of mimesis, differentiated as tōi en heterois mimeisthai, tōi hetera, tōi heterōs, phrases that convey nothing until they are filled out by the ensuing discussion. She suggests that Aristotle favoured such terms because they can be reapplied in different contexts; and there was maybe also an aesthetic dimension to Aristotle's practice.
The remaining papers move into the modern era. M. Humar's ‘Scientific Nomenclature of Species and Naming Practices in (Ancient) Biology’ looks at biological naming from antiquity onwards. Ancient writers used the everyday names for animal and plant species, names that variously described appearance, behaviour, cultural uses or associations, habitat or geographical location, or drew on mythology. In the early modern era, as biological knowledge expanded, new names had to be found. Those ancient practices continued, but new sources of names were added, with species being named after authorities in the discipline or figures in popular and political culture. Humar emphasises not just the cultural aspects of such naming practices, but also the desire to demonstrate the education or wit of the person inventing the name.
D. Berrens, in ‘The Rise of Botanical Terminology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, shows how initially, in the early modern period, classical terms were taken over, with Greek terms translated into Latin. Subsequently, as botanical knowledge expanded, thousands of new names were needed; also new research, especially once microscopes came into use, produced continual changes in the understanding of plant structure, and of the functions of different plant parts. Berrens shows that these changes led not simply to innovation in the Latin terminology, but also to a Ciceronian style making way for a more functional, technical style.
W. Golder's ‘Terminology and Professionalism in Technologized Medicine’ examines closely the terminology of modern medicine. By exploring extracts from a series of medical documents (mostly in German), Golder highlights how medical practitioners need to address different audiences – colleagues in their own specialism or in other medical roles, patients, students –, and terminology requires different handling in these different contexts; the provisionality of much diagnosis and prognosis, and the recognition of the emotional needs of patients, add further complications. Also, as medicine becomes increasingly technical, terminology is increasingly set by developers and manufacturers seeking to promote their products.
M. Schemmel's ‘Everyday Language and Technical Terminology: Reflective Abstractions in the Long-Term History of Spatial Terms’ looks at the relationship between technical language and ordinary language, taking three significant points in time. In the Mohist Canon, written in China around 300 bce, ordinary Chinese words (some of them reflecting local cultural knowledge) are used as spatial terms, but their application is altered by abstraction and generalisation. Then Schemmel shows how, in the modern era, the development of progressively more abstract ideas about space and motion, which were described mathematically, was never neatly in step with the development of appropriate technical language: thus Isaac Newton revolutionised the concept of force, relating it to acceleration rather than motion, yet in the Principia often used the language of the old system; later, Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity used terms rather opaque to the lay-person, so that Einstein resorted to the language of older assumptions about space to explain his ideas.
Finally, T. Stolz and I.H. Warnke, in ‘Epikhartika: About Language on Maps with Special Reference to Colonial Matters’, propose a new technical term (with Greek roots), epikhartika, to denote the ‘language on maps’, which includes not only toponyms but also common nouns (and phrases) such as ‘train station’, ‘school’, ‘beautiful lake’, ‘unexplored region’; the latter have generally been neglected in the study of maps. By examining a number of colonial maps, the authors illustrate the linguistic properties of epikhartika and their frequent reflection of colonialist agendas.
To turn to Dowson's substantial monograph, this is devoted to Latin philosophical terminology and adopts a ‘case-study’ approach, taking five authors – Lucretius, Cicero, Apuleius, Calcidius, Boethius – and focusing particularly on their translations of Greek philosophical works. The introduction sets out the aims of the book and looks at methodological issues, then six chapters examine the individual authors – Cicero gets two chapters –, and a seventh chapter offers concluding remarks. Five appendices constitute a crucial part of the work, because they contain complete alphabetical lists of the lexical innovations that Dowson finds in each author, with explanations and discussions of each term; the associated chapters generally discuss a selection of these words. (It is a pity that the book does not have indexes of Latin or Greek words, to facilitate finding the discussions of specific terms.) Dowson's thesis is that in these five authors, spanning more than half a millennium, one sees an overall progression from a freer, less literal kind of translation in Lucretius and Cicero to a decidedly more literal approach in Boethius. At each stage he sees cultural rivalry with the Greek originals, though it takes different forms: Lucretius and Cicero are aiming to produce an independent Roman philosophical literature, matching the Greeks in literary quality and embedded in the Roman cultural and political context; Boethius tried to transpose the logic of Aristotle into Latin in such a way that Latin readers would no longer need to turn to the Greek originals – and indeed Boethius provided a foundation for the development of Latin philosophy in subsequent centuries. Thus Dowson's title points towards the fact that Greek philosophy is translata into Latin in a broader sense than word-for-word translation.
Some central themes recur throughout the book. One is that the egestas trope, the writer's complaint about the poverty of Latin compared to Greek, is rarely if ever to be taken literally: it is one of a range of rhetorical strategies (including captatio benevolentiae and praeteritio) whereby the Latin writer draws attention to the process of rendering Greek terms or ideas into Latin, for a range of different purposes: to ease readers into accepting unfamiliar language; or to highlight the writer's skill; or, as Dowson argues regarding Cicero (pp. 108–9), as a pre-emptive defence against criticism from learned contemporaries. Another recurrent theme is that, when a Latin author suggests two or more Latin terms as equivalents for a single Greek term, he may be not so much casting around for the best Latin word as giving a rounded ‘360 degree’ view of the semantic complexities of the Greek term (pp. 83–7 on sōphrosunē is a good example).
Much of the value of the book lies in the detailed discussions of how individual terms and passages are rendered into Latin; there is not space for that detail here, so I shall select a few general points from each chapter. The introduction discusses the problems of defining what constitutes a philosophical technical term, then explains the four categories of lexical innovation that Dowson uses in the analyses: morphological calques; sense translations; semantic augmentation; and loan-words or loan-blends. Chapter 1 is ‘A Preliminary Case Study – Poetic Technique and Philosophical “Terminology” in Lucretius’. Lucretius’ poem is of course not a translation, but it does require Lucretius to convey many Epicurean (and other) philosophical terms in his poetry. Dowson starts with statistics showing that the great majority of Lucretius’ innovations are semantic extensions of existing words rather than new words. Besides opening up the broad themes of cultural rivalry, and the function of the egestas trope, Dowson also, for example, suggests that the use of philosophical Greek loanwords, which is rare, usually serves to draw attention to the strangeness of an idea, for instance Anaxagoras’ homoeomeria at 1.830ff. (pp. 65–6).
Chapter 2, the first on Cicero, surveys the whole of his philosophical oeuvre, emphasising its literary ambition, and then looks in detail at Cicero's practices. The ‘translation’ into a new Roman cultural and political setting is particularly evident in the use of officium for kathēkon in De officiis. As for using several Latin terms for one Greek term, besides other functions it can be an attempt to improve on the Greek terminology, as when at Tusc. 3.7 he rejects morbos as a verbum e verbo translation of pathē in favour of perturbationes, because he rejects the concept of these disturbances being diseases (pp. 93–5). Chapter 3 is an in-depth discussion of the Timaeus translation. After an examination of the relative frequency of Dowson's four types of linguistic innovation, there is a ‘Lexical Commentary’ on selected passages, with full discussion of philosophical, interpretative and linguistic issues. One conclusion is that some passages follow the Greek fairly closely, but are placed within a Romanised dialogue frame (as far as one can tell, given the incompleteness of what survives of the work), and other passages, such as the list of gods, are given a decidedly Roman shape and content.
Chapter 4, ‘Apuleius’ Translations of Greek Philosophical Vocabulary: A Case Study of the De Mundo, De Platone et Eius Dogmate, and the Peri Hermeneias’, after looking at Apuleius’ own remarks about translation, again proceeds by selective commentary on each work (Dowson is open-minded on the authorship of Peri Hermeneias). As with Cicero, the De Mundo translation is shown to be a re-creation rather than a literal translation – for example, the geography is given a Roman slant, and a short passage of autopsy is inserted at 328; also, Apuleius’ Middle Platonist ideas influence the translation. At the same time Apuleius is readier than Cicero to introduce new terms without explanation or apology, though he generally avoids loanwords. In the other more technical works Apuleius is less concerned with linguistic purism or patriotic embellishment.
Chapter 5, ‘Calcidius, Cicero, and the Timaeus: A Comparative Case Study’, compares their respective translations of the Timaeus, taking account also of Calcidius’ commentary. There is the debated question whether Calcidius knew Cicero's translation: Dowson is inclined to think it probable that he knew Cicero and engaged in aemulatio with him, but admits that the matter is uncertain. He proceeds to detailed comparisons of the writers’ translation choices. In some respects Calcidius clearly translates more freely than Cicero, inserting additions to the text and excursuses: here the motive is clearly didactic, as with the provision of a commentary. Overall, like Cicero, he prefers semantic augmentation and multiple translations to new terms or loanwords – though in the commentary he is more ready to use Greek loanwords, often glossed.
Chapter 6, ‘Boethius and the Language of Logic’, focuses on Boethius’ translations of Aristotle's Organon and Porphyry's Isagoge (not his more literary or theological works). The fact that he produced commentaries on some of these works, and second editions of some translations, demonstrates his carefulness and his didactic aims. There was not much of a Latin tradition of writing works on logic, but there was the Apuleian Peri Hermeneias, and Boethius knew Victorinus’ (lost) translation of Porphyry's Isagoge and criticised it. Dowson's careful analysis of Boethius’ translation vocabulary shows that he is ready to create new terms even where old ones existed, and his aim throughout is clarity and faithfulness to the original – though at the same time there is the ambition to replace the Greek works with his Latin translations.
Chapter 7, ‘Concluding Remarks’, draws threads together and suggests possible areas for future research.
Dowson's book is a notable achievement, but it shows signs of hasty revision, with various misprints and other rough edges (e.g. on p. 204 the final sentence of the first paragraph of commentary belongs within the next paragraph; and axis is not a Greek loanword [p. 196]), though nothing to trouble attentive readers. In a work with so much dense argument about specific words and passages, any reader is likely to find occasion for questions or disagreement. I offer a couple of more general comments: I am more sceptical than Dowson is about the evidence he offers for Calcidius knowing Cicero's translation of Timaeus (pp. 236–8) – here and elsewhere one could have more explicit recognition of the phenomenon of ‘recoinage’ (see G. Pezzini, in: J.N. Adams, N. Vincent [edd.], Early and Late Latin: Continuity or Change? [2016], pp. 21–4); and while Dowson provides valuable statistics on lexical innovation, it would have been useful also to give frequencies per 10,000 words; for instance, he mentions (p. 240) M. Lemoine's observation that most of Calcidius’ coinages are in the commentary rather than the translation – but to what extent is that explained by the considerably greater length of the commentary?
Both of these volumes make valuable contributions to their fields. Many readers will doubtless concentrate on what is closely related to their own specialisms, but there is value in reading all through. For instance, the question of practitioners and experts using different technical registers with different audiences, central to Golder's paper, also crops up elsewhere, and one wonders how widespread this was in the ancient world. Then I was struck by the wide range of terminologies used within these studies of terminology (some contributions manage with well-established terms, others use recently created terminologies); also by the wide range of things that count as terms (abstract philosophical or physical terms are a very different matter from biological species names); and, as for imprecision in philosophical terminology, Dowson (p. 86) observes that it is a feature of the western philosophical tradition from Plato to Kant.
