On 17/06/2012 10:24, Richard Smedley wrote:
On 17/06/12 10:01, Gadget/Steve wrote:
If you need a complete, always up to date, dictionary then you need to
work in a dead language like Latin - no new words introduced for over a
thousand years AFAIK or an artificial one, e.g. Esperanto where a
committee or other authority specifies which words are valid. English
is growing and changing every day as old words are brought back into use
or redefined by individuals and new words introduced by individuals,
organisations and mistakes - all it takes is for something to start
being used by enough people - even brand names and abbreviations picked
to be unique enter the language as they are generalised, e.g. hoover,
LED.
Beware of assumptions ;-)
Latin was a living language amongst European scientists generally
as recently as a couple of centuries ago. As a consequence of which
it was adopted by botanists and is thus used day-to-day to describe
new plant discoveries.
A consequence of this is that botanic latin picks up new words as
needed, when something like a scanning electron microscope comes
along and needs to be named :)
I would also point you towards the Vatican's dictionary of modern-day
Latin (which it needs for documents which reference "astronaut",
"television" and, presumably, "scanning electron microscope"). This is
the Italian version. I'm sure you get the idea.
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/institutions_connected/latinitas/documents/rc_latinitas_20040601_lexicon_it.html#a
TJG
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