When I use a word . . . On the origins of medical words

A plurality of nouns

I have previously commented on a strapline, published under the heading of a recent article in the online version of The Times newspaper titled “How to become a doctor—a step-by-step guide by those who’ve done it.”1 It began “The entry criteria is tough and the course even tougher ….” Now pluralising English nouns is not always as straightforward as you might think. In most cases, of course, you just add the letter /s/—doctor/doctors, nurse/nurses, and so on.

But what about words ending, for example, in –ic? “Physic” was an archaic word for medical science, but, like logic, magic, and rhetoric, “physic” in this sense is a non-count noun, which can’t be pluralised. “Physics” is something else again.

Which raises the question of words ending in –ics. Are they singular or plural? Americans seem to think that mathematics is singular—they abbreviate it “math”; but in British English it’s “maths.” Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean that the original word is plural; we merely abbreviate it as if it were. If we want to talk about more than one kind of maths we have to say something like “branches of mathematics.”

Plural forms of words that end in the letter /f/ are also problematic, from calves and elves to wives and wolves; but what about handkerchiefs, oafs, proofs, and staffs? Or dwarfs/dwarves, hoofs/hooves, and wharfs/wharves?

Greek and Latin words pose different problems, particularly relevant to medical and other scientific words. Take words ending in /–us/. If an English word reproduces a Latin noun of the second declension, ending in /–us/, the plural ends in /–i/: fungus/fungi, uterus/uteri, although we might still say uteruses. But if it’s from the third declension, the plural ends in /–ra/: corpus/corpora, genus/genera. And if it’s from the fourth declension, the plural ends in /–uses/: prospectuses and sinuses. The plurals of words ending in /–us/ derived from Greek also end in /–uses/: octopuses, not octopi, and viruses, not viri.

Then there are Latin words ending in /–um/ and Greek words ending in /–on/. They have plurals that end in /–a/: from Latin, dictum/dicta, datum/data; and from Greek phenomenon/phenomena and yes criterion/criteria.

So, to say “the criteria is …” as The Times journalists did, is a rank solecism, and one that several commentators on the article were not slow to point out derisorily. It is a surprisingly rare error in biomedical publications, but it is occasionally seen.2 Even the World Health Organization is not immune from making this error, as an extract from the text of one of its reports shows: “The user should verify the performance of the alternative internal standards in own laboratory to ensure the quality control criteria is met.”3

And occasionally authors seem to think that “criteria” is simultaneously both singular and plural. Here are two examples:

• “Equal weightings across all individual criteria—a test that reflects a case where no one criteria is more important than another.”4

• “While existing criteria have been generally accepted as the best available at the time it was specified, this criteria should not be considered as cast in stone.”5

Comparing English medical words with the general vocabulary

It’s helpful to know all this, because Greek and Latin origins dominate medical words.

Even those who have not been educated in the classical languages will recognise this. In illustration of this, a comparison of medical vocabulary and general vocabulary is instructive.

I have carried out such a comparison. In order to do so, I have taken 876 random headwords from Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary, 30th edition (2003), and 904 random headwords from The Chambers Dictionary, 13th edition (2014). I did so simply by choosing the final entry on each right hand page. I then determined the main language of origin of each word.

Here’s what I found.

• about 76% of the medical words were derived from either Greek or Latin words or hybrid combinations: Greek 35.5%, Latin 33.3%, and hybrids 7.3%

• in contrast, in the general vocabulary Greek or Latin words or hybrid combinations contributed under 40%: Greek 11.4%, Latin 26.6%, and hybrids 0.8%

• in the general vocabulary, Old English and Germanic derivatives were common, at around 25%, compared with just under 6% of the medical words

• in the general vocabulary, words coming from French, albeit often with Greek or Latin forebears, comprised 12.5%, compared with about 1% of the medical vocabulary

• only seven modern languages featured as originators of medical words (Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, Malayalam, Portuguese, Spanish, and Urdu, 1.5% in all), compared with 23 as originators of words in the general vocabulary (Arabic, Australian aboriginal, Azerbaijani, Berber, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Malay, Maori, Moroccan, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, and Yiddish, 8% in all)

The development of the English language

The differences in the distribution of originator languages in the English general vocabulary and the medical vocabulary can be understood by considering the history of their development.

Most of the languages that have contributed words to English originally derived from an early language called Proto-IndoEuropean. That such a language must have existed was first proposed by Sir William Jones (1746–94), an English judge who, having been appointed to a judiciary position in Calcutta in 1786, and already fluent in Greek and Latin, taught himself Sanskrit and reported, in an address to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, of which he was the founder and president, that “No philologer could examine [Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin] without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” Then Thomas Young, discussing Johann Christoph Adelung’s Mithridates, oder Allgemeine Sprachenkunde (Quarterly Review, October 1813), called that common linguistic source “Indo-European.” And in 1916 Carl Darling Buck introduced the term “proto-Indo-European” to describe the theoretical roots from which modern words are thought to have developed.

Take, for example, the IndoEuropean root ​​PƏTER, and consider the words for “father,” which it meant, in languages other than English:

• Sanskrit: पिता (pitaa)

• Greek: πατήρ

• Latin: pater

• Italian: padre

• Sicilian: patri

• Spanish: padre

• Catalan: pare

• Portuguese: pai

• French: père

• Occitan: pair

But consonants change, and, according to Grimm’s Law, as languages develop, plosive /p/ in Greek and Latin forms becomes fricative /v/ and /f/ in Germanic ones.6 Thus:

• German: Vater

• Dutch: vader

• Danish: far

• Norwegian: far

• Swedish: far

• Icelandic: faðir

• Old English: fæder

And we may therefore understand how it came about that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father.

After incursions under the command of Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 BC, Roman legions, commanded by their emperor, Claudius, calling the land Britannia, invaded in 43 AD, and stayed for over 360 years, leaving in 410 AD. By then, Latin had become established as the language of Christian prayer and it saw a resurgence in Britain at the end of the 6th century, with the arrival of St Augustine the first Archbishop of Canterbury, sent by Pope Gregory to convert the English to Roman Catholicism. By then, in the late 5th century, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes had also invaded and had brought their Germanic languages, establishing Anglo-Saxon or Old English (Ænglisc) as the main spoken language.

The era of Old English dominance came to an end when the Normans invaded in 1066 and created Anglo-Norman, co-existing with Anglo-Saxon. The classical evidence of this is in the way we use Anglo-Saxon words to name animals—pigs, cows, sheep, deer—but Anglo-Norman words, from Old French, to describe their meat—pork, beef, mutton, venison.

Greek words also entered the language because many Latin words were derived from Greek and also because of the influence of Greek science, mathematics, and philosophy. Medical and scientific vocabularies were therefore particularly affected.

A final thought

Studying classical languages brings several advantages. It exposes us to classical thought in both the sciences and humanities. It teaches us about history. It helps us to acquire a rich English vocabulary and to understand how our language is constructed, in particular giving us a more precise understanding of English grammar. It trains us in logic and systematic thinking. Its literature is rich and highly entertaining, especially the mythology, and it is much better read in the original than in translation. Furthermore, having read it we are better equipped to understand the classical allusions that occur in later authors.

As John Cleese, playing the part of Reg, a member of the People’s Front of Judea (or was it the rival Judean People’s Front?) in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, reluctantly put it, “Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health … what have the Romans ever done for us?” The answer was “Brought peace,” but it could also have been “enriched our language.”

For those who want to explore further the Greek and Latin origins of the words we use, both generally and medically, I have appended the titles of a few books from which to choose.789