When I use a word . . . The languages of medicines—chemical names

LanguagesThe definition of a [natural] language in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)1 is “The system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people, community, etc., typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic structure.” A good clear definition, although I rather prefer the less rigorous but more succinct definition postulated by the US linguistics expert Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949) in 1926: “the totality of utterances that can be made in a speech-community.”2 Bloomfield further defined an utterance as “an act of speech” and a speech-community as “[a community within which] successive utterances are alike or partly alike.” So there it is—a language. Humans have about 5000 of them, give or take 1000—they’re hard to enumerate.Of course there are other kinds of languages. For instance, computer languages. Well over 1000 of them, from A.NET to Z++.3Then there are the specialised languages espoused by the members of…
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