COGNITIVE AND STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTICS OF LATIN TERMS FOR INFECTIOUS AND INVASIVE DISEASES WITH A ZOOMORPHIC...

Area of Science:

• Medical terminology
• Linguistics
• Parasitology

Background:

• Infectious and parasitic diseases often have names derived from Latin.
• Zoonymic components (animal-related terms) are frequently part of these disease names.
• Understanding the linguistic structure of these terms is crucial for medical communication.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the morphological, structural, and lexico-semantic features of Latin terms for infectious and parasitic diseases with zoonymic components.
• To compare the formation and usage of these Latin terms with English medical terminology.

Main Methods:

• Continuous sampling from medical textbooks, manuals, and dictionaries.
• Application of structural, semantic, and descriptive linguistic methods.
• Comparative analysis with English medical terminology.

Main Results:

• Monolexemic terms with zoonymic components are predominantly formed using suffixes.
• Multi-word phrases often use mixed syntactic constructions, combining Greek and Latin origins, though these are less common.
• Eponymous and toponymic formations are atypical for specific nosological forms in helminthology.
• Disease names prioritize the pathogen over the researcher's name.
• Prefix-suffix formation is sporadically observed.

Conclusions:

• Latin terminological units are predominantly used for infectious and parasitic diseases with zoonymic components compared to English.
• Unlike other clinical terms with zoonymic elements, these disease terms do not heavily rely on associative meanings.