Abstract
THE S.P.E. Tract No. 48 (Oxford, Clarendon Press; 1937) contains three articles that are of interest to writers on scientific subjects. Mr. Otto Jesperson deals with the use of such terms and phrases as ‘almost’ before a verb or noun, ‘kind of or’ sort of, ‘rather than’, ‘as much as’, and so on. Sir W. A. Craigie notes many variations in the spelling of English words, but concludes that “the irregularities of modern English are of slight importance in relation to the language as a whole”. Dr. C. G. Darwin's article on “Terminology in Physics” is reprinted from NATURE (138, 908; 1936). His main points, it will be remembered, are: the difficulty of translating appropriately a term from a foreign language, the use of an inventor's name instead of a descriptive term, and the use of adjectives, such as ‘microscopic’ and ‘macroscopic’, to express opposite ideas by words of nearly the same sound and spelling. Others may be added to this list. For example, ‘sismi’, an equivalent for earthquakes, is simple to pronounce in Italian, and ‘seismes' still more so in French, but the corresponding English term ‘seisms' is intolerable. Another point is the formation of the singular of a word that has come down to us in the plural only. It would seem permissible, because natural and convenient, to use ‘scree’ as the singular of the Icelandic word ‘screes’.
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English Terms in Scientific Writings. Nature 139, 578 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139578c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139578c0