New edition approaches “specialized languages”

A new book by Dr. Zakaria Arslan, Professor of Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts, Meknes, was recently published by the Academic Book Center in the Jordanian capital, Amman, entitled Specialized Languages: Issues of Construction and Approaches to Analysis. The book presents a unique vision, both in representing the ways of constructing these languages ​​and in the models and mechanisms of their analysis.

According to data regarding the publication, “the book justifies that the study of specialized languages ​​has become diverse, and philosophers, logicians, sociologists, linguists, semioticians, terminologists, philologists, mathematicians, and other makers of natural and unnatural sciences meet in approaching the issues of their construction and the approaches to their analysis. They look at their intrinsic systems and patterns of their construction, the ways in which they are formed, the types of their functions, the plans for their modeling, the paths of their work, and the methodologies for teaching and learning them, without neglecting, on many occasions, to look at their epistemological, civilizational, and historical dimensions, and at the issues of their social, cultural, and religious construction; Until these languages ​​became a fertile subject for scientific discussions, inhabited by the obsession with controlling, refining, adapting and engineering the language, to meet, with all cleverness, transparency, mastery and attractiveness, the needs of expressing various cognitive purposes, whether theoretical, technical or professional-sectoral, as they were inhabited, at the same time, by the desire to achieve the smooth transfer of knowledge from its purely theoretical scientific scope, i.e. “knowledge”, to its educational fields; i.e. “learned knowledge, a transfer that adapts to the requirements and needs of learners”.

Dr. Zakaria Arslan’s words in this book are based on “five central issues, which together constitute its cognitive background, theoretical framework, analytical scope, and evaluative scope. The first is that subjecting the structures, styles, texts, and discourses of all specialized languages ​​to a unit that can only be achieved theoretically is not without shortcomings and defects. The second is that reducing the study of specialized languages ​​to the study of what they contain of ‘terminological categories’, or to dealing with the issues of generating the elements of those categories through derivation and coinage, or to merely following the issues of their translation and Arabization in the past and present, is not based on conclusive theoretical evidence, nor on an actual specialized linguistic reality; since texts are prior to the making of dictionaries, and it is inconceivable that a dictionary exists before the existence of texts spread on the tongues of speakers.”

“Specialized languages ​​cannot be reduced to a mere irregular observation of some of their syntactic models, and their tracking by inventory and description without analysis; therefore, considering ‘terminological classification’ as synonymous with specialized languages, as is learned from many Arab and Western studies alike, seems, in our view, to be a corrupt consideration. Also, considering these languages ​​as synonymous with what are called ‘scientific methods’ or ‘specialized methods’ is a great fallacy, the same writer states.

The third of these central issues, according to the same source, is that “any interpretation of the behaviors of the elements of specialized languages, and of the methods of their construction and of their paths of operation, that is built outside the framework of texts and media of discourses, and the elements of history, culture, religion and civilization, all or some of them, appears to be a weak, erroneous and corrupt interpretation; because it simply separates the manufacture of specialized tools of expression from their reality and truth, and from the communicative field from which they were initially issued, and in which they later controlled, in order to throw them into the pitfalls of idealism, utopianism and dreamy theories.”

The fourth of these issues indicates that “the elements that form and structure these languages ​​are not limited to linguistic elements only; rather, there are other elements closely related to the concept of specialization, and here it concerns cultural, cognitive, and social elements; rather, the rationality of these languages, their contents, logic, or regularities have social origins in a range of contemporary social approaches,” according to Arslan.

The last of these issues is concerned with “examining a group of standards and criteria that were transmitted by contemporary Western and Arab writers, and which they made the basis for the art of speech in science and technology, and in all specialized sectors, and which they considered the only outlet for achieving the ‘scientificity’ of the specialized language, so they surrounded it with an aura of uniqueness, and began to resort to it in their theorizing about what the manifestations of that language should be in the phrase, structure, sentence, text, and style, without turning over the consideration of its requirements, and without the tradition of their transmission of it leading them to review it, or to think about modifying it or bringing something else! Without realizing that what was suitable for the languages ​​of the natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry, is not necessarily suitable for languages ​​and other knowledge of the humanities or non-humanities,” according to the same author, asking: “Is it not one of the laws of expressing the contents of different specializations and its controls the diversity of paths and the variation of ways and mechanisms, in terms of grammar, structure, circulation, style and text!?”