Enrico Fermi and the making of the language of nuclear physics

Each of the specialist communities, including for example scientists, technologists, bird watchers, football commentators, draws on the general languages of the members of the communities. The enthusiasm of scientists sometimes runs ahead of their natural languages and yet the more successful of the enthusiasts invariably harness their general language to lucid statements about the universe here and a microbe there. Enrico Fermi is a good example of how scientists harness their general language and sometimes their second general language. In italy, Fermi and his colleagues created the Italian LSP of atomic and nuclear physics during a 20-year period spanning 1920-1940. Fermi then worked in the USA with a number of non-native speakers of English to create and elaborate the English LSP of nuclear physics, of quantum mechanics, of nuclear (reactor) engineering amongst other subjects. We describe how a corpus-based diachronic study can reveal the manner in which Fermi and his colleagues used the lexicogrammar of Italian to create the Italian LSP of atomic and nuclear physics. The particularly productive use of inflectional and derivational morphology of Italian is noteworthy in Fermi's writings.