Comment on You got it, buddy
yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months agoI don’t have an issue with using scientific names in scientific contexts if you intend to publish something international researchers should be able to parse. But just like maths, there is no problem in just… translating names? Imagine if you had to phrase sentences like: “The numerus realis make up a copia infinita.” You’d have to translate Latin every time new studens would be taught because most mathematical terms convey a decent amount of information.
What I do have an issue with is using these terms anywhere outside of international contexts.
A doctor should not tell their patient they have a “humerus” fracture. In German they would take about the upper arm bone.
Or imagine if a doctor told you there is an infection in your digitus pedis. Fortunately English didn’t replace the term “toes” with its scientific one… YET.
Hell, I could even apply this to doctor names in English which require a dictionary for anyone trying to parse them. I had to look up half of them by the way.
Children’s Doctor <> Pediatrician
Women’s Doctor <> Gynecologist
Tooth Doctor <> Dentist (the least bad in my opinion - at least it’s short)
Eye Doctor <> Optometrist
Neck-Nose-Ear Doctor <> Otorhinolaryngologist (wtf???)
Skin Doctor <> Dermatologist
Like, surely there must have been (native) English terms for those doctors in the past. It’s not like the medical field popped into existence in the 1700’s. You can’t tell me a 15th century English peasent used Latin/Greek derived names for common specialized doctors.
Eye Doctor <> Optometrist
Perfect example of why that is a bad approach. An Optometrist can measure your eyes for basic vision problems and monitor your retina issues, but you’d need an Ophthalmologist if you need surgery on those eyes for something the Optometrist finds.
Optometrists/opticians aren’t doctors over here though. They belong to the trades. This field doesn’t exist in Germany the same way it does in the US/Britain:
Optometric tasks are performed by ophthalmologists and professionally trained and certified opticians.
Eye doctors does actually refer to ophthalmologist though, I picked the “wrong” translation which ignores the differing legal frameworks. Looking back, I certainly went to the full blown ophthalmologist just for optometric purposes.
Otorhinolaryngologist
Ot- => ear
rhin- => nose
laryng- => throat
or just ENT, I’ve heard that being used.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
“ear-nose-throat” is commonly used in English.
And it kind of is like the medical field popped into existence in the 1700s.
Kornblumenratte@feddit.org 9 months ago
Otorhinolaryngology was born in the 1850s, though, not 1700s.
yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
Partially. In German, the term eye doctor has first been recorded in 1401 (ougenarzt) (according to Wikipedia).
The 1700’s made enormous medical progress - but it’s not like people prior to that had no need for specialized doctors. For example, according to etymonline the term “dentist” was first used in 1759. You can’t tell me dentists didn’t exist for many centuries prior to that and didn’t have an “English-derived”, self-explanatory term. I mean, I never knew “dent” was Latin for tooth until reading the etymology just now.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Sure, but many of those words for specialised doctors came to English through French, not directly from Latin or Greek. And I don’t think that you can reasonably argue that English words with French origins aren’t by now a native part of the language. We use many of the same names in Dutch too, coming from French loanwords.
yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
Wasn’t English’s French influence mostly over by this point? The Norman conquest added a bunch of French vocabulary but by the 1700’s, England was a stable colonial power.
And for very frequently used terms - like anatomical terms - the English root remained mostly intact and loanwords weren’t used. Arm, nose, shoulder, knee, elbow etc. are not French in origin.
I suspect it could be remnant of nobility separating itself from the common people. By only ever referring to anything with its Latin term, you can distinguish the wealthy, highly-educated from the poorer, lesser-educated people. After all, if you spoke Latin and/or Greek those terms make a lot of intuitive sense.