Neologism in modern English
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ion. Correspondingly an undeveloped language would be one that serves only some of these functions, but not all. This is to interpret language development as a functional concept, one which related to the role of a language in the society in which it is spoken.the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten, the mother tongue of the habitants is English. Education and administration, however, take place in Dutch; English is not normally used in these contexts. In Sint Maarten, English is an undeveloped language. The islanders find it hard to conceive of serious intellectual and administrative processes taking pace in English. They are, of course, perfectly well aware that English is used in al these functions in Britain, the USA and elsewhere. But they cannot accept that the homely English that they themselves speak (although dialectally it is of quite standard type that is readily understood by speakers from outside) is the same language as English in its national or international guise.the same way, English in medieval England was not a developed language, since many of the social functions of language in the community could be performed only in Latin or in French.unnaturally, the members of a society tend to attach social value to their languages according to the degree of their development. A language that is developed, being used in all the functions that language serves in the society, tends to have a higher status, while an undeveloped language is accorded a much lower standing, even by those who speak it as their mother tongue.
2)The notion of a register
The notion of developing a language means, therefore, adding to its range of social functions. This is achieved by developing new registers.register is a set of meanings that is appropriate to a particular function of language, together with the words and structures which express these meanings. We can refer to a mathematics register, in the sense of the meanings that belong to the language of mathematics (the mathematical use of natural language, that is: not mathematics itself), and that a language must express if it is being used for mathematical purposes.language embodies some mathematical meanings in its semantic structure - ways of counting, measuring, classifying and so on. These are not by themselves sufficient to form the natural language component of mathematics in its modern disciplinary sense, or to serve the needs of mathematics education in secondary schools and colleges. But they will serve as a point of departure for the initial learning of mathematical concepts, especially if the teaching is made relevant to the social background of the learner. The development of a register of mathematics is in the last resort a matter of degree.is the meanings, including the styles of meaning and modes of argument, that constitute a register, rather than the words and structures as such. In order to express new meanings, it may be necessary to invent new words; but there are many different ways in which a language can add new meanings, and inventing words is only one of them. We should not think o a mathematical register as consisting solely of terminology, or of the development of a register as simply a process of adding new words.
3)Development of a register of mathematicsthe development of a new register of mathematics will involve the introduction of new thing-names: ways of referring to new objects or new processes, properties, functions and relations. There are various ways in which this can be done.
.Reinterpreting existing words. Examples from mathematical English are: set, point, field, row, column, weight, stand for, sum, move through, even, random.
.Creating new words out of native word stock. This process has not played a very great part in the creation of technical registers in English (an early example of it is clockwise), but recently it has come into favour with words like Shortfall, feedback, output.
.Borrowing words from another language. This has been the method most favored in technical English. Mathematics examples include degree, series, exceed, subtract, multiply, invert, infinite, probable.
.Calquing: creating new words in imitation of another language. This is rare in modern English, though it is a regular feature of many languages; it was used in old English to render Christian terms from Latin, e.g. almighty calqued on omnipotens. (Latin omnipotens is made up of omni-meaning all and potens meaning mighty; on this model was coined the English word all-mighty, now spelt almighty).
.Inverting totally new words. This hardly ever happens. About the only English example is gas, a word coined out of nowhere by a Dutch chemist in the early 18th century.
.Creating locutions. There is no clear line between locutions, in the sense of phrases or larger structures, and compound words. Expressions like right-angled, square on the hypotenuse, lowest common multiple are examples of technical terms in mathematics English that are to be classed as locutions rather than compound words.
.Creating new words out of non-native word stock. This is now the most typical procedure in contemporary European languages for the creation of new technical terms. words like parabola, denominator, binomial, coefficient, thermodynamic, permutation, approximation, denumerable, asymptotic, figurate, are not borrowed from Greek and Latin - they did not exist in these languages. They are made up in English (and in French, Russian and other languages) out of elements of the Greek and Latin word stock.language creates new thing-names; but not all languages do so in the same way. Some languages (such as English and Japanese) favour borrowing; others (such as Chinese) favour calquing. But all languages have more than one mode of word-creation; often different modes are adopted for different purposes - for example, one method may be typical for technical words and another for non-technical. There is no reason to say that one way is better than another; but it is important to find out how the speakers of a particular language in fact set about creating new terms when faced with the necessity of doing so. The Indian linguist Krishnamurthi (1962) has studied how Telugu-speaking communities of farmers, fishermen and textile workers, when confronted by new machines and new processes, made up the terms which were necessary for talking about them.are not static, and changes in material and social conditions lead to new meanings being exchanged. The most important thing about vocabulary creation by natural processes is that it is open-ended; more words can always be added. There is no limit to the number of words in a language, and there are always some registers which are expanding. Language developers have the special responsibility of creating new elements of the vocabulary which will not only be adequate in themselves but which will also point the way to the creation of others.
4)Structural aspects
But the introduction of new vocabulary is not the only aspect of the development of a register. Registers such as those mathematics, or of science and technology, also involve new styles of meaning, ways of developing an argument, and of combing existing elements into new combinations.these processes demand new structures, and there are instances of structural innovation taking place as part of the development of a scientific register. For the most part, however, development takes place not through the creation of entirely new structures (a thing that is extremely difficult to do deliberately) but through the bringing into prominence of structures which already existed but were rather specialized or rare. Examples of this phenomenon from English can be seen in expressions like signal-to-noise ratio, the sum of the series to n terms, the same number of mistakes plus or minus, each term is one greater than the term which precedes it, a set of terms each of which stands in a constant mathematical relationship to that which precedes it. We can compare these with new forms of everyday expression such as it was a non-event (meaning nothing significant happened), which are derived from technical registers although used in nontechnical contexts.is no sharp dividing line, in language, between the vocabulary and the grammar. What is expressed in one language by the choice of words may be expressed in another language (or in the same language on another occasion) by the choice of structure. The open-endedness referred to earlier is a property of the lexicogrammar as a whole. There are indefinitely many meanings, and combinations of meaning, to be expressed on one way or another through the medium of the words and structures of a language; a more can always be added. This is a reflection of the total potential that every language has, each in its own way.the past, language development has taken place slowly, by more or less natural processes (more or less natural because they are, after all, the effect of social processes) taking place over a long period. It took English three or four hundred years to develop its registers of mathematics, science and technology, and they are still developing. Today, however, it is not enough for a language to move in this leisurely fashion; the process has to be speeded up. Developments that took centuries in English and French are expected to happen in ten years, or one year, or sometimes one month. This requires a high degree of planned language development. Not everyone involved in this work is always aware of the wide range of different resources by means of which language can create new meanings, or of how the language in which he himself is working has done so in the past. But there is, now, a more general understanding of the fact that all human languages have the potential of being developed for all the purposes that human