Quelques caractéristiques du vocabulaire de l'acupuncture

The authors study a few characteristics of French acupuncture vocabulary. Their observations are based on a corpus of texts gathered from approximately twenty works. The contacts between two languages with extremely divergent systems give rise to many borrowings, thereby increasing the number of synonyms in the receptor language, in particular given the necessity to Romanize the writing system of the borrower language. Transcribing Chinese ideograms into French causes virtually insurmountable phonological, spelling, grammatical, morphological, syntactic and other difficulties. Synonymy and borrowing are described critically by use of a Romanization protocol. They are examined from the standpoint of language planning and the internal functioning of an emerging terminology, partially based on foreign lexical units. A few directions are proposed to facilitate the standardization of this LSP vocabulary.