Neoclassical combining forms in secondary education terms: The case of chemistry and medicine

The aim of this article is to analyze the terms in the chemistry and medicine fields registered in the secondary education textbooks examined in the "VEB. Basic Specialized Vocabulary in Compulsory Education: A Corpus-Based Extraction and Analysis" project, which contain neoclassical combining forms. In this respect, besides the difficulty of understanding and learning a large number of terms (1,432 for chemistry and 813 for medicine), students must face the semantic opacity of the prefixed and suffixed combining forms commonly found in the terms of these two areas. Eighteen different combining forms marked in DIEC2 (Catalan Language Dictionary of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans) as belonging to chemistry were detected in the VEB corpus, forming 203 different terms, and the 34 combining forms tagged as belonging to medicine and pharmacy, formed 58 terms. The results show that the combining forms belonging to chemistry are usually more transparent since they are generally the result of shortening the original Catalan word, whereas the forms from medicine tend to come from Latin and, mainly, from Greek. Lastly, although the medicine field shows fewer terms, they tend to contain other combining forms that, even if they are tagged as belonging to the “common lexicon” in DIEC2, are closely related to medical terms as we can see in such cases as -emia (comb. form -aemia or -emia, “blood”), -itis (suffix -itis, “inflammation”), -iatre (from Gr. iatrós, “doctor”), and -osis (suffix -osis, “pathology”), among others.