Chemical Terms in History: Polysemy and Meaning Transfers

From Firenze University Press Journal: Substantia

Helge Kragh, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

When chemists speak of the language of their science they typically refer to the nomenclature related to the numerous chemical compounds and how their names and symbols have changed over time. What once was known as ‘fixed air’ is now called carbon dioxide CO2; what is commonly known as just alcohol is ethanol C2H5OH in chemical language. Lavoisier’s chemi-cal revolution in the 1780s traditionally hailed as the beginning of so-called modern chemistry was to a large extent based on a radical reform of chemi-cal nomenclature. The collaborative work Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique from 1787 was not only “a momentous contribution to the world-wide vocabulary of Western science,” as it has been called, but also an integral and most important part of the chemical revolution. However, there are other ways in which a focus on words and phrases may elucidate the historical development of chemistry and science generally. One of them is to pay attention to what linguists call ‘semantic shifts,’ an expression that refers to words which migrate from the scientific domain to common language and as a consequence change their meaning. But it can also be the other way around, that is, a commonly known word which is adopted as a tech-nical term in a particular area of science. A third variant of semantic shifts occurs when a technical term in one branch of science is reused in another branch, what may be called internal word migration. Although the term in question is the same, when reused it occurs with a different meaning. As pointed out by the linguist Carolynn Van Dyke, the reuse or recycling of words is not a one-way transfer since recycled scientific terms will often return to the domains, scientific or non-scientific, from which they originally came. More generally, this study is part of a larger project focusing on the etymological and terminological compo-nents of the natural sciences through history. In science as elsewhere, words are more than just words. Like other communicative cultural forms, science depends crucially on the chosen language and the words of which it consists. Since the history of science is echoed in the devel-opment of its language, an examination of the latter will inevitably provide additional insights in how various branches of science have developed over time.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Substantia-2444

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