Fachterminologie als Konfliktfeld: Fallstudie am Beispiel der finnischen Musikfachsprache

The article examines, on the basis of the development of Finnish musical terminology, the conflicts that can arise in the creation of a specialized terminology. The problem area can be divided into three sections: Language planning and maintenance, structural problems of semantics and morphosemantics, and subject-specific peculiarities. Since there was no systematic subject-specific
language planning in Finnish music history, and general language maintenance dealt with music terminology only sporadically, many terms arose as ad-hoc creations in texts, and each textbook
contained new terms for the same concepts. This reveals challenges in word formation: usually several root words and derivational morphemes are suitable for forming musical terms, as is exemplified by the Finnish terms for ‘scale’. In addition, there has long been a conflict between the preference for
autochthonous Finnish terms/neologisms and the adaptation of foreign words. One problem area in the use of autochthonous equivalents is their lack of neutrality. Many musical words are originally metaphorical, and in a loan transfer these conventionalized metaphors are “revived”, as can be seen, for example, in the autochthonous Finnish equivalents for ‘consonance’ and ‘dissonance’. In many cases, loan words prevailed or were reinstated, so that Finnish music terminology today is etymologically rather heterogeneous. Besides Italian, German was of great importance as a donor or intermediary language. Finally, the article deals with Ilmari Krohn's attempt to develop an original Finnish terminology system of musical form, which he unsuccessfully tried to establish in Germany as well. This shows how subject-specific problems in the construction of conceptual systems and linguistic challenges in the creation of terminology can overlap.