Analysis and elaboration of morphological patterns in medical terminology: German-Spanish

Abstract

Medical terminology derives mostly from Latin and Greek because historically these languages were the communication vehicle in the medical discipline. For this reason,medical technical terms have maintained their univocity thanks to precise terms thatpreserve their semantic content. In keeping with this, Greco-Latin technicisms offer optimum characteristics for medical terminology because they maintain the semantics of their terms given that they are languages that are no longer subjected to changes of meaning.

Currently, this characteristic remains in the sense that we are talking about old terminology, yet one that remains alive and,above all, internationally binding. However, the disambiguation principle does not always remain in German medicalterminologydue to, among other reasons,the existence of synonyms and, also, alternatives coming from the general langugebut used as medical technicisms(vid. Burgos Cuadrillero & Rohr Schrade, 2016, p. 78). The heterogeneous designation that the different medical terms receive makes it considerably difficult to create a homogeneous medical language. The aim of this contribution is to study this phenomenon in depth. In addition, we want to extend the analysis,from a contrastive point of view, tothe morphological peculiarities of the different processes of word formation in medical terminology, with special attention given to composition and to derivationbothin German and Spanish. The purpose is to design different models in the medical language to understand its terminology analysing and classifying its technicisms based on prefixes, suffixes and compounds of two and more constituents, taking the German language as starting point and working out the equivalents in Spanish.