A Morphological and Semantic Analysis of Librarianship and Information Science Terminology

Persian language is the target language which imports scientific and technical words from English. Technical words are imported into Persian through borrowing, loan translations and other Persian word-formation processes. By adopting a morphological and semantic framework, the present study sought to determine the morphological and semantic problems of Persian technical terms in librarianship and information science.
This descriptive-comparative study is conducted through content analysis. 1510 Persian technical terms were compared to their English equivalents. The sample data of the study were extracted from "Vocabulary of Information & Librarianship" by Abolfazl Hashemi.
Findings: The results showed that Persian technical terms of librarianship and information science were made by the processes of syntactic groups (77/21%), derivation and compounding (18/14%), borrowing (2/98%), and finally conjunction. Clipping, acronymy, and abbreviation are not common in Persian. Some Persian technical terms of librarianship and information science suffer from duplicate redundant surface forms, ignoring lexical dependencies, ignoring lexical clusters, extreme loan-translation, deviation from Persian grammar, use of definitions rather than equivalents, missing the emotive sense of lexical items, use of long lexical forms, mismatch of word form and meaning, and ignoring equivalents approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature.