Termcraft is a world-heritage story. It chronicles the origins of naming, writing, and reasoning through the prisms of lexicology and terminology science. Evolving through rock marking, primitive pottery, and the earliest clay tablets and seals, to mythology and philosophy, it reveals how the Term became the keystone of scientific research, knowledge transfer, and economic development. Speech and writing are posited as referential systems used to control space and time, thereby ensuring survival. Ice Age symbols inaugurate 'signs for special purposes'; Balkan Vinčan logograms and later Sumerian and Egyptian pictograms point to Languages for Special Purposes, with determinatives marking technical concepts. The doctrines of ideas, naming, and being are scrutinized; their interaction with cosmic order and individuation through boundaries is illustrated with a deified ‘Creating Word’ in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and The Levant. The logic of the Word’s role in self-definiting and reasoning, both analogous and prognosticative, is analyzed. A perception-processing tool, the Logos, is identified in the first definition of ‘definition’ and ‘term’, and in syllogistic substitutions; when used with Aristotelian categories of thought, they clarify discourse and intellectual enquiries. What emerges is a fool-proof thought-testing matrix based on a new systemic Word, the Term, paradigm of today’s knowledge chips.
1. Findings in Termcraft
1.1 Ice Age signs as ‘signs for special purposes’
1.2 ‘Languages for special purposes’ (LSPs) and determinatives in Vinčan
1.3 Sumerian and Egyptian LSPs
2. Special Features in Termcraft
2.1 Aristotle’s Categories in table format; seminal Greek quotes, with Latin and English translations, for a direct analysis of the Aristotelian definition and the syllogistic term, and their role in cognition
2.2 Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Levantine, and Greek cosmogonies revealing conceptual, dual-structure hierarchies found in Aristotle’s Categories (element/substance and properties)—notions of order applied to mental constructs
2.3 Examples of intercultural sign formation and continuity, and of word compounding and derivation in early languages
2.4 Synthesis of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian determinatives; ancient languages-English glossaries, and tables filled with logograms, cuneiforms, and hieroglyphs—coding systems bearing concepts Aristotle would build on
3. What is Original in Termcraft
3.1 Decryption of the terminological aspects of the manifestations of the god of the Word
3.2 Comparative analysis of divinatory, legal, and syllogistic discourses
3.3 Nilotic art as a form of nominal encoding
3.4 Links between the Thothian Principle and the Theory of Everything; between pre-writing diacritical marks, determinatives, and the terminological modifiers of the Linnaeus system
3.5 Analysis of the Word in the Torah’s Genesis and a critical-path table of the Israelite Creation showing relations of genericity, specificity, opposition, and sequentiality later applied to the drafting of definitions
3.6 Pointers to sources for medieval and Renaissance theoretical terminological research
4. What Termcraft offers students
4.1 A textbook highlighting the complexity of terminological ramifications in communications and translation
4.2 A comprehensive reference for the ancient sources of ISO rules of definition, essential for safety and law-making
4.3 An integrated approach to ancient societies and the consolidation of vocabularies that preceded the birth of philosophy and the Greek scientific revolution, with chapter-by-chapter “Points for Discussion”
4.4 A landmark contribution to the limited English-language literature on terminology science