Professional paper
The Male-Female Relationship of the Croatian Word “Bol” (Pain)
Željana Klječanin Franić
orcid.org/0000-0001-9653-4645
; Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience which occurs due to the stimulation of specialized nerve endings, connected with real or potential tissue damage. This definition from the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Human and Veterinary Medical Terms indicates that pain may be of dual origin: it may be a physical sensation but also a psychological experience (emotion). Apart from this ambiguous meaning contained in the noun pain, in the Croatian language, given that it is characteristic of nouns in Croatian to express gender, number and case, the word bol (pain) also shows gender ambiguity, because it appears in both the male and female genders. In this study, on the basis of examples from various professional biomedical texts, we will discuss the dual gender of the noun bol, and the contemporary normative and terminological recommendations on the choice of grammatical gender in relation to its meaning.
Keywords
pain; gender ambiguity; biomedical texts
Hrčak ID:
238112
URI
Publication date:
30.3.2020.
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