THE LINGUISTIC PLACE OF MEDICAL TERMINOLOGY IN IKA

ABSTRACT

          This study examines the linguistic place of medical terminology in Ika language. A Igoid language (Greenberg 1963). The aim of this study is to illustrate comprehensively the derivation of medical terminology in Ika. In this work, data were collected from medical dictionaries and the Ika language community, data samples relating to the topic at hand were collected from the native speakers. The language of medicine is a broad research filed, so broad that there ought to be a special field of linguistics called medical linguistics. Its development, especially the development of medical terminology, is interesting both to medical historians and to linguists. Hence, this study will look at the lingua franca language in relations to Ika language. Nowadays the most influential medical journals are written in English and the result of this is that medical doctors choose English as the language of intentional communication. In the past medical terms were derived from Latin or Greek and today with English being the lingua franca of medical communication, apart from Greek and Latin terms, there are terms composed of words borrowed from English e.g Koronararterien-Bypass or Screening and there are hybrid compounds, consisting of a Greek or Latin prefix or suffix and an English root e.g. Biofeedback.