Greek and Latin formatives are highly productive sources for new technical terms coined in English. Consequently, very recent words in the scientific and technical registers that look like loans from the classical languages may actually have been formed within English from morphemes abstracted from loanwords that entered English long ago. It is frequently difficult or even quite impossible to say whether a given word is a loanword (taken from a Greek or Latin dictionary), or is a coinage within English from existing morphemes of classical origin.

Until recent times, it could be assumed that educated professional people would have had schooling in Latin and often in Greek. Today such an assumption is unwarranted in either the UK or the US. To compensate for the ignorance of classical languages, a work called Composition of Sccentific Words (Brown 1956) made its appearance. This book, described as 'a manual of methods and a lexicon of materials for the practice of logotech-nics', is an 882-page synonomy referring mainly Greek and Latin forma-tives to general concepts, with extensive cross-references. The user can look up either a classical formative and be referred to the general concept to which it relates or a general concept and find a list of formatives related to it. The term logotechnics from the self-description of the book on its title-page is an example. The entry logos ('Gr. word, discourse; logion, saying') is cross-referenced to word, which lists 22 words, from appositum to vocabulum, with derivatives from them and other cross-references; techno - is similarly cross-referenced to art, with 27 words listed under it. The book includes a morphological sketch of Latin and Greek, information about their spelling and pronunciation, and advice about how to form scientific terms from them. The work is a DIY manual for twentieth-century Robert Cawdreys whose lack of classical education matches that of the readership the original Cawdrey was addressing.

• Identification

The Latinate vocabulary is a particular problem for both analysis and etymology. English has borrowed so many Graeco-Latin words that it has imported much of the morphemic and morphophonemic patterning of those languages, thereby creating difficulties in analysing English morphemicaUy (Ellegard 1963) and also in identifying the etymology of new

• Recent and older nnologisms

The percentages of words formed in English and of those borrowed from other languages in the recent corpuses contrast strikingly with those in The Shorter OED, as reported by Thomas Finkenstaedt (1973, 118-56). In the following table, the SOED percentages represent the history of English over approximately 1,200 years, as

• Types of recent neologisms

Estimates of the relative productiveness of one or another type of word formation are subject to many variables and consequently uncertainties. Not least among those is establishing the correct etymology of a word. For example, unconscious 'that part of the mind not available to introspection, which nevertheless affects behaviour' might

• 1776 and after: an age of revolutions and empires – 7

Standardisation and literacy go hand in hand since the acquisition of literacy presupposes the existence of a codified written standard, and standardization depends on the existence of a written form of language. The continuing expansion of Standard English is reflected in the new text types which begin to appear in

• Wordfrequency

The frequency with which words are used has implications as a practical matter in stylistics, for example in setting an appropriate reading level for school books. The word frequencies in two standard corpuses of English, the Brown Corpus for American and the LOB Corpus for British, are reported by Hofland and