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Words of foreign origin

A further obstacle is generated by scientific vocabulary being saturated with words of foreign origin, which concern concepts and abstract qualities. Nowadays young people do not study Latin or Greek. Basic English that they learn in their English classes is not of much help either, as vocabulary introduced there does not necessarily correspond to that of science. Children do not know the meaning of prefixes such as "equi", "iso", "bi", "dis", "anti", "a", "pro", "contra". They have no feeling for words such as "global", "local", "universal", "unified", "deterministic", "implication", "alternative", "induction", "homogeneous", "heterogeneous", and many, many other concepts useful not just in physics classes. In my teaching experience students have never asked spontaneous questions concerning the meaning of those words. They learn them from context. However, when they meet a new name the context of a new physical concept that they have not mastered yet, the level of difficulty they thus encounter increases enormously. One forgets this easily since to us these concepts have been well known and familiar for a long time. My research shows that even children of intelligentsia background in their first years of high school are not acquainted with the above-mentioned words of foreign origin.


next up previous
Next: The language of logic Up: Language barrier Previous: Interference of everyday and
Krzysztof Malarz
2000-01-14