Kilka uwag o zapożyczeniach włoskich w polskiej terminologii medycznej

The article is an attempt at an initiatory, quantitative and semantic verification of Italian loanwords in the field of medicine and related sciences in the contemporary Polish language. In the introductory part, the aim and the methodology adopted in the research are described. The criteria for identifying loanwords depend on the assumed research perspective: for one-sided research, a loanword from Italian may be considered both a lexeme of Italian origin adopted into the Polish language and a lexeme of any other origin, provided that it was borrowed into Polish via Italian (e.g. the word gabinet). In the case of contrastive research, on the other hand, only a lexeme of Italian origin can be considered as an Italian loanword (an Italianism), regardless of the language through which it came into the Polish language (e.g. the lexeme malaria). The further part of the article is an analytical segment devoted entirely to Italianisms present in Polish medical terminology. In this part, the initial corpus was analysed in order to preparatively verify the number of Italianisms occurring in Polish medical terminology. Then, the separated target research corpus was subjected to a qualitative analysis. The analysis confirmed that – taking into account the requirement of Italian origin – the number of Italianisms in Polish medical terminology is lower than what is shown in the sources consulted.