Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2013
While the Latin technical writers have been, and continue to be, studied by historians of the relevant discipline, scant attention has been devoted by linguists to their technical language. If they have interested philologists and linguists at all, then until recently it was as writers of popular, or ‘vulgar’, Latin, rather than of ‘technical’ Latin. This neglect of Latin technical languages as varieties in their own right reflects a wider reluctance to take technical languages into account in other areas of linguistics. There is a substantial literature devoted to technical languages in isolation, especially to the practical problems of communication in technical contexts, of teaching, translating and standardising technical languages, but coherent treatment of technical words and technical languages in the context of the lexicon or the language as a whole is almost entirely lacking in the standard works on word-formation and semantics.