Abstract:

One of the peculiarities of lingua-cognitive and cultural aspects in scientific research is the shift of the emphasis onto a human’s subjectivity instead of studying the object itself. This approach helps us better understand the essence of cultural phenomena and their contents. Also, using this approach a researcher can gain information about inner structure of concepts, identify system of values and appreciation, which is influenced by the cultural and spiritual experience of mankind. We believe that the idea is extremely important as the words under study in this article have the human personality behind them.

It should be mentioned that the terms from computer sphere are being analyzed not only by people studying exact sciences, programmers or computer whizes but also by linguists and philologists. Many scientific articles are devoted to the question of studying eponyms, there exist dictionaries and vocabularies, lots of theses are defended on the topic of eponymy which is also examined within the framework of a thesis. This is because the problem of studying eponyms helps us tracing the influence of people on the given language. Terms-eponyms as a part of any language contribute to a more profound understanding both of a person and their language. Studying cultural peculiarities with a help of linguistic factors is of great practical and theoretical value to broad our horizons. As well, if we take linguistic and cultural factors into account, it should be mentioned that the interpretation of eponyms – their semantic definitions and encyclopedic descriptions – can also be of a great interest for researchers.

The eponyms described in the article are taken from information technology sphere. And it is not by chance as IT is closely connected with our daily life. Thus rapid development of IT-language creates a good basis for further and more detailed analysis of linguistic factors related to IT-sphere. Consequently, one of the most topical questions in linguistics nowadays is eponymy and computer terms eponymy in particular.

To write this article three computer-terms dictionaries have been studied. The terms that relate to IT-sphere sideway, i.e. mathematical phenomena or physical phenomena were excluded from the sphere of our interest. The eponyms under study were subdivided into the following groups: names of algorithms \ codes \ functions; laws\ methods\ prescriptions; hierarchies \ databases\ tables; external devices.

Having studied eponyms in IT- sphere we came to the conclusion that their number is extremely small and the major part of the terms describes the inner processes of computer work. In many cases the proper name embedded in the term becomes a common noun and can hardly be associated with a certain person. The three dictionaries under study do not show the real picture and percentage of the eponyms in IT-sphere in comparison to ordinary computer terms, though we can say for sure that their number is extremely small. In addition, there are not many dictionaries containing this lexical layer which gives us an opportunity to continue the study together with other researchers of Linguistics and Philology spheres. Moreover, one more benefit of studying eponyms is that they can unite the students from two fundamentally different fields of scientific studies – philologists and computer technologies which can help widening their knowledge of foreign cultures and making them integrate into each others’ researches.

Keywords:

Terms, eponyms, linguistics, philology, IT, terms-eponyms, computers, IT-language.