Technics: The historical prelude to our concept of terminology

Abstract

The concept of technics became naturalised in the first half of the 19th century in the struggle for language during the Reform Age and the language reform in it. From the very beginning, it was closely connected to the concepts of technical terms and the dictionary of technical terms. The word ’technics’ has been used since then and it turns up as a synonym for terminology in the linguistic and scientific literature. Apart from its basic meaning it became associated with the notion of artificial language later, but nowadays there are also other meanings attached to it. Our technics or terminology is connected to the language reform and the establishment of forums of the reform forums of the Hungarian scientific life in the Reform Age in many ways. However, it is true that several initiatives and works from the previous centuries can also be connected with the birth of Hungarian technics, and works in science and language philosophy written at the end of the 18th century provide the basis for its flourishing in the 19th century. The changing historical trends in the 19th century show several periods in the history of Hungarian technics, namely the boom in the Reform Age, the diversions in the time of Absolutism, the new awakening after the Compromise, and clearing up and complete recovery in the fights and conflicts of new orthology. It can be mentioned that although ’terminology’ appears sporadically in the second half of the 19th century, it could not widely replace ’technics’ until the middle of the 20th century. Then in the second half of the 20th century, along with the concepts of technics and terminology other – partly experimental or approximate – concepts like technolect, sociolect, group language or scientific language appeared.