« Expériment » en 1823 - à propos d’un néologisme français mort-né

Abstract

The English term experiment is conventionally rendered in French by expérience. The latter term, however, when translated back into English, may give either experiment or experience. Thus, expérience lends itself to two semantically justifiable, but different translations, at least as long as contextual factors remain ineffective. This article argues for the use of expériment (as equivalent of the English word experiment), a stillborn neologism coined in the early nineteenth century, as a means for reducing the risk of unsettled understandings relating to epistemological matters of experimentation when moving from French to other languages (and vice versa).