Un studiu comparativ între engleza americană și engleza britanică în domeniul fotbalului

Introduction

Sport is a universal “language”, which is “spoken” all over the world. From all the types of sport association football is the most followed, with 3.5 billion fans all around the globe and with a growing fan base. This popular game in many countries (Argentina, Brazil, etc.) became part of the local culture. This is even more true for the United Kingdom, since football originated from there. Although it is not the most popular game in the United States of America, association football is fairly practised on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, as well. People in both countries speak English, nevertheless there are many differences in culture and in language. In this regard football is not an exception, there are several differences between the two nations concerning “the beautiful game”. As it is the case of all specialized fields of study, association football uses specific terminology and there are many differences as well as similarities between American English and British English. In this thesis, I will try to analyze these differences from the point of view of terminology. I have chosen this subject for my thesis because I could not find any studies or glossaries on this topic. Although there are clear differences between American English and British English regarding the football terminology, even the name of the game is different: football in British English and soccer in American English.

In the first chapter of the thesis I will present a general overview of terminology. I will start by defining terminology and introducing the emergence of this field of study. Then I will present the definition of word and term by contouring the differences between them. I will also define the concept. As soon as the meaning of these basic building blocks of terminology is clear, I will focus upon the classification of concepts. Then I will proceed further with the analysis of the relationship between concept and term.

In the second chapter I will present terminology as an interdisciplinary field of study. I will start with discussing the relation between terminology and lexicology followed by a short overview of term formation processes and their main effort, the avoidance of ambiguity. Furthermore, I shall discuss about the relationship of terminology and lexicography.

Afterwards, I will present the practical part of terminology, the terminography, or as it is called more prevalent, the management of terms. At the end of the chapter I will briefly present a few other linguistic fields, which intersect with terminology, such as pragmatics or informatics. Throughout the chapter, special attention will be given to the specific application of terminology in British English and in American English in the field of association football.

In the second part of the thesis I shall focus more on sports terminology. In chapter three I will present a brief history of sport and especially of football for a better understanding of the game background. In this part I will present the emergence of football terminology, as well as its evolution in the English language. After presenting the emergence of football in the United Kingdom as well as in the United States of America, I will highlight the cultural and gameplay related differences between these two nations. Exploring the cultural differences will help us to understand the etymology of the football terms and why some particular terms are used differently in the United States than in the United Kingdom.

In the last chapter I will talk about the differences and similarities in football terminology between the British English and the American English. As a case study, I will compare football commentaries presented by American and British football commentators. These texts will be analyzed from the point of view of terminology and I will compare the terms used in the United States and in Great Britain. For the analysis, I will categorize the terms in four groups. I will talk about terms related to players and strategies; terms related to scoring, score counting and terms related to time measurement; terms related to the field and the equipment and finally terms related to the gameplay and the movement of the ball. After analyzing the cultural differences between the Americans and the British I shall be able to analyze not only the terms but to observe slight nuances of the commentaries, differences and similarities regarding the style of the used language.

In conclusion, this paper is intended to analyze the used terminology in American English and in British English regarding the field of association football. During the next pages, I will analyze the use of terminology specific to this field of study and I will show examples of their use and application in everyday life, in order to emphasize the differences between the American and British culture from linguistical, cultural, social and anthropological perspectives.

I. Terminology: General overview

1.1 Definition

The word terminology, as there is with the name of many other fields of study, is polysemous and it can have more interdependent meanings between which the delimitation is not always clearly stated. According to the Bidu-Vranceanu et al. (1997: 507) terminology has the following meanings:

1. Aggregate of terms or specialized words belonging to a sociolect which is characterized by monosemy and unambiguity.

2. Specialized language or a linguistic subsystem which uses terminology (in the first sense) and other linguistic or non-linguistic sources in order to realize an unambiguous specialized communication which transmits information in a specific professional activity field.

3. Interdisciplinary science concerned with the general problems of terms, which analyzes knowledge logically, concept hierarchy, linguistic and nonlinguistic coding as well as the problems regarding the creation of terms for a specific science or field.

In the Online Dictionary of Language Terminology1, this subject field is defined a bit simpler in the following way:

1. The set of terms belonging to a science, a technology, or any other delineated area of thought or action.

2. The study of terms and their use.

The term terminology is dated back to 1770, when Christian Gottfried Schütz, a German poetry and rhetoric professor at Jena, combined the medieval Latin word “terminus” meaning ‘word, expression’ with the Greek “-logia” meaning ‘a dealing with, a speaking of’.2 The first endeavors to gather the nomenclature of a specific domain started centuries before the

1 http://www.odlt.org/

2 http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=terminology

concept of terminology received its label. For example, Vesalius (1514-1564) in his book “On the Fabric of the Human Body” described the human anatomy with pictures explaining its terminology. Although this was not actually a glossary, the specific anatomy terms he created in the sixteenth century are still valid today.