A multidisciplinary astronomical dictionary On the occasion of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009), a Paris Observatory astronomer has created an interactive dictionary of astronomical concepts, entitled Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Its present version contains the definitions of some 7000 entries, accompanied by their French and Persian equivalents. Since astronomy is tightly related to other branches of knowledge, the dictionary also includes a large number of terms in physics, mathematics, geology, meteorology, and even philosophy.
An etymological dictionary
This is the first etymological/linguistic/terminological dictionary ever created in astronomy. It is intended for professional and amateur astronomers, university students in astrophysics, as well as linguists. Utmost attention has been given to the linguistic and terminological aspects of words, their morphological structure, and, in a broader scope, the mechanisms that govern a scientific language. In particular, affixes (prefixes and suffixes) constitute an essential element of technical terms in the Indo-European languages. They are therefore included with due consideration.
A dictionary with educational vocation
The hypertext ability enables the reader to move on from a given concept to related ones. Moreover, the dictionary also guides the reader to families of associated concepts. For example, the term diffraction is hyperlinked to diffusion, dispersion, distribution, scattering, which cannot be interchanged. This approach in the formation of a technical dictionary, though new, wishes to display the conceptual space in which the astronomical subset vocabulary operates. This aspect of the work is currently being expanded to all possible cases and could be integrated in a Virtual Observatory.
A dictionary with cultural vocation
In the present age of exponential scientific and technological developments, the languages which are incapable of expressing new concepts are unfortunately doomed to disappear. It would be a dramatic loss if historical languages, which have made important contributions to human culture and civilization, and therefore belong to a common human heritage, died out. Creating equivalents to English scientific terms maintains the capability of a language to express the most modern concepts without undue borrowings from other languages and keeps its word forming mechanisms alive. Of course languages borrow from each other and there is no problem with this provided that the number of loanwords does not exceed a certain threshold and that they do not affect the structure of the receiver language.
A dictionary with international vocation
The work initiated by this project could be extended and serve as the seed of a wider endeavour to create a fully international astronomical thesaurus including languages from all continents.
The astronomical part of this project benefited from contributions by many astronomers, mainly at Paris Observatory. The linguistics part and other associated aspects rely on many written sources as well as precious advice from several individuals all over the world — Europe, Northern America, and Iran.