Specialized/technical language

Specialized/technical language

by: Dr Mohammad Akram Nadwi
Oxford

This is a way of using words that fix their meanings for yourself and others. It is useful and necessary to have precise terms for highly specialized tools and instruments, and for designating certain measures or quantities and, in certain disciplines for designating certain concepts. This use of language is strictly limited to communication with others who know the terms that you are using – people in the same trade or engaged in the same intellectual discipline. Technical language is meaningless to all others and needs to be translated before it could be understood by them.

Because technical language is restricted to the function of communication with fellow specialists, it is useless (meaning it cannot be used independently of ordinary language). This is because the main function of language is not communication, it is thinking. So, when specialists want to think about or in their discipline, they need structure and the words of ordinary language to construct their thought and build their argument.

Ordinary language does not depend for its effectiveness on definitions of words or learned knowledge of lists of words and their dictionary meanings. The reality is that human beings were endowed by God with the gift of human language which is meanings to which words are loosely attached. Everyone understands the meaning “bread”, “water”, “up”, “down”, “left”, “right”, “in”, “out”, “hot”, “cold” and so on, and similarly meanings like “love”, “hunger”, “anger”, “thirst”, “hate”, “justice” … as a child grows in the womb and then emerges into a human speaking community, it will learn to attach particular sounds to those meanings. Those sounds are what we call words. As the child grows it will learn that those meanings can also be indicated by different words, and they can be combined and recombined in different ways to modify the meanings and the words used to indicate them.

Meaning in ordinary language is most comparable to a bag into which, at different times in life, different words can be put in or taken out as the person is satisfied or dissatisfied with what is in the bag. Sometimes it is enough to say I am hungry. Sometimes it is not enough, and so you add to the bag other words like ravenous. The same is true of so-called abstract ideas like justice and love and time and decay. Overtime the meaning is deepened and enriched or the opposite. It depends on the effort and the opportunity of the individuals to reflect on their thought and feelings and make them clearer to themselves and to others.

Thought is the inner life of human being, it cannot be switched off, it can only be moved from one matter to the other. God is the witness always of everything that passes through mind. Sometimes you will notice that you have been thinking about someone or something for a long time, and that your thoughts were coherent and intelligent and full of words. But if you should try to write on paper or speak into a recording machine, you will realize that you were thinking without words, except here and there things like place names. That is why it takes a lot of effort slightly different from thinking to write your thoughts down.