The structure of the medical and pharmaceutical terminology in the Romanian language

When we analyse diachronically the Romanian medical and pharmaceutical terminology, we can say that it represents a lexical ensemble characterized by heterogeneousness. It has its own dynamics due to the specific character of the terms. New lexical elements have been added permanently in the twentieth century to the corpus of medical terms established in the last century. Another characteristic of the medical terminology in our century is its international tendency. The great number of international words--among which those of Latin, Greek and, more recent, English origin--make it easier to decode the message for the specialists speaking different languages. The great number of words of this type emphasize the scholarly, artificial character of the vocabulary. A well-represented class, from the point of view of its number, are the neologism of Latin-Romantic origin, terms that have been adapted phonetically and morphologically to the system of the Romanian language. The linguistic facts we find in the specialty texts (in the XIX and XX centuries) confirm our belief that, as a whole, the medical terminology is a linguistic field in a continuous process of modeling, and mainly that is open to be renewed.