I’m starting to think that the structure and formation of words in English was instrumental in making the scientific revolution and medical advances so prominent. (I’ll admit, I read a paper about this in undergrad, but now I’m starting to think there’s something to it.) It’s so easy to make new words in English, using prefixes and suffixes, in a way that I don’t think is so easy in French or Spanish (the only two other languages I’ve studied, so I could be totally wrong about this). It’s become especially apparent in recent weeks; different professors use different terms to mean the same thing, but we all understand them anyway:

* A thrombus is a blood clot in your arteries or veins. Thrombo genic means something that helps generate clots. Thrombolytic means something that helps lyse (break up) clots. And then you add the prefix anti-, and it reverses the word.
* Hyper- and hypo- are all too common. Same with the prefix ‘dys’. You can have a hyperlipidemia (increased lipids/fats in your blood), a hypolipidemia (decreased lipids/fats in your blood), or just dyslipidemia (an abnormal amount in your blood.) Or it can be called hypercholesterolemia.
* The ‘-emia’ suffix just means “in the blood.” Bacteremia, lipidemia, kalemia, anemia. On and on and on.
* And you can always just add adjectives wherever you want. A myopathy can become a dilated, cardiomyopathy.

Is it this easy in other languages? I haven’t found it to be so, but maybe I just haven’t delved into foreign medical textbooks to find out.

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