ХИБРИДНИ КЛИНИЧНИ ТЕРМИНИ В АНГЛИЙСКАТА МЕДИЦИНСКА ТЕРМИНОЛОГИЯ

Abstract

The development of medicine, new methods of investigation and treatment lead to a continuous enrichment of the clinical terminology system and explain the impossibility of its international standardization. This study presents word-formation patterns of Greek-Latin terms excerpted from Stedman's Medical Dictionary, 1995. It traces the manifestations of lexical cross-linguistic synonymy of root-suffix clinical terms as a result of the capacity of combining forms to create multiple configurations. The reason for the integration of Latin anatomical terminology is its borrowing into English anatomical terminology mediated by French. Greek suffixes and suffixoids, because of their persistent meaning, come in combination with different root terminological elements: Greek (in traditional clinical terms), Latin or English (in hybrid clinical terms).  In this dynamic process, replacing the Greek element with its Latin equivalent often results in a change of the object in the terminological designation. There are trends in the emergence of new clinical terms that make more extensive use of Latin combining forms and also allow the use of English non-terminological language register as a root term element in medical terms. The study elucidates problems in teaching Latin in the English language to undergraduate medical students.