Kis növényvédelmi etimológia: „agrozoológia”? „agrozoológus”?

Abstract

The paper tries to interpret the formal and semantic meaning of the term "agrozoology". As to the basic meaning of this word, it expresses all relationships with animals in agriculture. Thus, animal husbandry, veterinary activity, as well as agricultural entomology belong to this term. However, it is used in some Hungarian academic circles as agricultural entomology. Anyway, "agrozoology" is an unnecessary term because there is a wholly accepted and accurate Hungarian term: növényvédelmi állattan = agricultural entomology. Where are the limits of the creation of new words? What kinds of semantic, historic criteria and demands can determine the building and development of the vocabulary and terminology? Whether there is recognized institutional control on the introduction and use of new words and terms? May have sloppy, inconsistent word creation any impact on the use and expression mode of a language? Computer search can help to easily and certainly find, evaluate the acceptance and real connotation of a questioned lexical unit or its equivalent semantic forms. Computational linguistic offers opportunity for investigation of events in the past. One of its options is the Google Books Ngram Viewer, an online search engine that charts frequencies of any set of comma-delimited search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in sources printed between 1800 and 2000.  In computational linguistics, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sequence of text or speech. The studied expressions were: "agrozoology", zoology, entomology, applied zoology, applied entomology, agricultural entomology and their German and French equivalents. The frequency of these words can characterise their existence and acceptance in the investigated period.  The Google search proved that the „agrozoology” occurred – except Hungary – only in Belgium (there in the name of a mere institute). As to the ngram search, the lexical items "agrozoology", "Agrozoologie", "agrozoologie" are not existing pseudo units. All the other searched word forms corresponded in meaning and historical environment to the Hungarian agricultural entomology meaning. The "agrozoology" and its equivalent forms are careless linguistic phenomena of which use may decrease the understanding and may hamper the abstract and logical thinking in the long term.