12. P-OSTE-UM RECONSIDERED

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)

            In Post 11 ("Wordhood Cubed?") I suggested among other things that, where P- stands for "any prepositional prefix," any word of the form P-oste-um would imply the existence of a large number of words of the form P-X-N (where X names a concrete object and -N denotes any nominative singular ending), with a predictable "standard" meaning:

                        P-X-N               =          something located in the relationship to X

                                                            specified by P.

The observation that neither P-oste-um nor P-X-N are particularly well-attested led us to consider the further postulates, first that

            any P-X-A (examples being many) presupposes a corresponding P-X-N;

and, second, that actually      

            any word of the form P-X-Z (where -Z stands for any ending at all), also

            presupposes a corresponding P-X-N.

Note that I didn't put this last postulate into so many words, but that this formulation is the logical result of our look at words of the form P-X-itis, where

                        P-X-ITIS            =        the inflammation of

                                                            something located in the relationshp to X

                                                            specified by P

                                                =          the inflammation of

                                                            P-X-N.

            The argument from P-X-A was almost parallel, but a little more convoluted.  Now I can admit that the convolution arose from putting the more difficult case first: as students of TheAnatomy of Medical Terminology know (from Chapter 13),  there is always a "Plan B" translation for any word of this shape:

                        P-X-A               =          pertaining to

                                                            something located in the relationship to X

                                                            specified by P

                                                =          pertaining to P-X-N!

            So far so good, or so I hope.  But I've been promising another look at the considerations which started this line of thought, and the example from which we began; perhaps I can put it this way:

            If a large number of words exists of the general form P-X-N, then a relatively large number of words of the specific form P-OSTE-UM (relative to the the number of specific forms of P) should also exist.  But, as we saw, only two are actually directly attested, out of more than twenty that "should" exist given that there are at least twenty productive prepositional prefixes running around out there in the real world.

            By now the plan of attack I have in mind is probably obvious; the key phrase in the preceding sentence is "directly attested," with emphasis on "directly."  What we were working with in the "Wordhood Cubed" post--the evidence arising from analogous words like P-X-A and P-X-ITIS--could be called a process of "indirect attesting" to the reality of the target words P-X-N.

            And such is the evidence that as it were "surrounds" the putative nouns of the form P-OSTE-UM.  As we have seen, end-oste-um (Post 2) is well-attested; peri-oste-um is also found "in the dictionary."  They are listed below; in aid of some of the "missing" others, so are the following words, all of the form P-OSTE-Z (where -Z denotes any ending at all; the asterisk "*" denotes that a word is not directly attested):

            WORD                         OUR TRANSLATION

            PERI-oste-um              the part SURROUNDING a bone

            END-oste-um               the part INSIDE a bone

            ECT-oste-al                  pertaining to

                                                something OUTSIDE a bone

                                                     = the *ECT-oste-um

            INTER-osse-ous           pertaining to

                                                something BETWEEN bones

                                                     = the *INTER-osse-um

                                                     = the *INTER-osTe-um

                                                (see below, on synonyms, for the skipped step)

            SYN-oste-otomy          the cutting of

                                                "bones-TOGETHER" (translated as "a joint")

                                                     = a *SYN-oste-um

                                                (by admittedly tortured logic!)

The following synonyms are also attested:

            INTRA-oste-al              <cross-referenced to INTRA-osse-ous>

            INTRA-osse-ous           pertaining to

                                                something INSIDE a bone

                                                     = the *INTRA-osse-um

                                                     = the *INTRA-osTe-um

                                                     = the END-oste-um (above; attested)

            ENT-ost-osis                <cross-referenced to EN-ost-osis>

            EN-ost-osis                  = *END-ostE-osis

                                                (see Post 2 for the gory details!)

            *END-oste-osis            an abnormal condition involving

                                                something INSIDE a bone

                                                     = END-oste-um (above; attested)

                                                     = *EN-oste-um

                                                     = *ENT-oste-um

            Analogously, the following form presupposes a synonym for *ECT-oste-um:

            EX-ost-osis                   an abnormal condition involving

                                                something OUTSIDE a bone

                                                     = the *EX-ostE-um

                                                     = the *ECT-oste-um.

            Synonymity is itself another "multiplier" in terms of "real but unattested words" (see a forthcoming Post): as cross-listings in the dictionaries show, pretty much any synonymous combining form can be substituted for another (see also The Anatomy of Medical Terminology, passim).  In the examples above, the combining forms oste- and osse- are synonymous; therefore a "fully-expanded count" of the words we are considering here would also include those generated by a rule like

            for every P-OSTE-UM attested directly or indirectly, there is a synonym

            P-OSSE-UM; and vice versa.

            Similarly, just as end-, en-, ent- and intra- are synonymous (as we saw above), so too are prefixes denoting the opposite locational relationship, "outside," namely, extra-, ex-, and ect-.  Therefore *EXTRA-oste-um and, of course, *EXTRA-osse-um, have to join the club (along with *ECT-oste-um and *EX-oste-um, indirectly attested above).

            Nor do these "indirect attestations" exhaust the possibilities we have opened up here.  Just because no current word seems to exist suggesting that the concepts expressed by the phrases listed below denote useful objects, does that mean that one or more of the candidate words listed beside them may not someday be just as real as periosteum and the rest?

            CONCEPT/DEFINITION                       CANDIDATE WORD(S)

            something UPON a bone                    *EPI-oste-um

            something BELOW a bone                  *SUB-oste-um, *INFRA-oste-um

            something BESIDE a bone                   *PARA-oste-um

            something BEFORE a bone                 *PRE-oste-um

            There is more to say about all this.  For now, notice how we have been able to use the concepts applied to the derivation of the "meta-rule" about P-X-N in the Post "Wordhood Cubed" to considerably expand the count of arguably real words symbolized by the much more specific template P-oste-um.

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More on Stiles Medical Terminology here.

11. WOODHOOD CUBED?

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)

             Our discussion of "wordhood" (see Posts 3 & 5) leads us to yet another consideration.  Now that we are "scaling it up," what if we move away entirely from the concept of generic words like "bone" or "tissue" which name general categories with many specific members, and consider what we might do with what could be called a generically describeable set of words exemplified by at least one well-attested specific member?  For example, any Medical Dictionary will show us (by including it) that the word

            peri-oste-um               a part surrounding a bone

is a so-called "real" word.  Now, the "generic" features of this construction are two:

            1) the termination -um, denoting a physical object, here in conjunction with osteo- naming a part somehow associated with a bone (either belonging to it, or in some other way involving it);

            2) the prepositional prefix, which by definition restricts the nature of the "association" to "locational involvement."

            It might seem that a new kind of rule can be hypothesized here, this time having at its smallest scale nothing to do with specific members of a generic category like the one called "bones," but rather with specific body-parts (or other objects) named generically by the addition of any specific PREFIX denoting LOCATION to the "word-remnant" -osteum:

                        If the set of real words in Medical Terminology includes one word of the form

                        P-oste-um (where "P" represents a PREFIX denoting LOCATION),

                        then that set also includes

                        all words of the form P-oste-um.

            Unfortunately, an actual count "in the Dictionary" reveals that only two of our postulated twenty or more words have so far been attested.  Eighteen words "missing" out of a potential set of twenty is pretty dismal arithmetic, and would seem to augur badly for our rule. To try to salvage it, we might begin by replacing "all words of the form P-oste-um" by the phrase "a large number of words of the form P-oste-um," on the grounds that by getting scrappy we might be able to convince you that some number of such words are "real" even though unattested.  But this touch-up would only return us to the (possibly circular) arguments of the "fighting words" post; therefore, now that we've seen something about the effects of change of scale, let's also try moving toward a "meta-rule" from these admittedly discouraging beginnings.

            The rule we can postulate by as it were "zooming out" from P-oste-um is of course formed by replacing -oste-um by something more general.  For -oste- we can read  -X- (designating as always "any organ or part"); and since the termination -um is only one of a number of nominative singular endings -N which all function the same way in naming real, concrete, objects, we can write our new meta-rule formulaically:

                        If the set of real words in Medical Terminology contains even one word

                        of the form P-X-N (where -N stands for any nominative singular ending),

                        then that set also includes

                        a large number of words of the form P-X-N.

            Notice that in this rule we are no longer making all-inclusive predictions: "a large number" is probably as specific as we can be.  And to prove to you that what I'm trying here is not a kind of verbal sleight-of-hand, I want you to remember that our first specific example of this very meta-rule generated a measly 2 out of a possible 20 or more predicted words--I am not trying to baffle you into forgetting this!

            Now let's make the additional observation that, at "scale," all of the words generated by our new meta-rule mean "the same thing;" that is, any word

                        P-X-N (given the definitions previously described) will name

                        a body part or other physical object involving X in the locative way

                        specified by P.

Thus, for example,

            end-oste-um                a part inside a bone

            peri-enter-on              a part surrounding the intestine

            para-cortex                 a part beside the cortex

            Note that on the dimension of translating from medical terminology into English there is nothing new here, nothing that isn't predicted in Chapter 13 of The Anatomy of Medical Terminology; what is new here is that we are using the as it were "generic" translation as the base for a "meta-rule" to generate medical words.

            Confused?  To "touch bases" with reality for a moment, a quick examination of the actually attested relevant words ("in The Dictionary") associated with just three of our locational prefixes (endo-, peri- and para-) gives us fifty words which fit our pattern (specifics available on request).  While this number is arguably "respectable," it is still discouragingly small given the huge scope of our category -X-.

            But remember that our overall thesis here is that the set of all real words is far larger (orders of magnitude larger) than any set which will ever be found in any dictionary.  At the particular scale we are discussing here (P-X-N), we can begin with a simple (and non-controversial) observation: if there is an adjective formed by the usual Latglish method of adding an adjectival ending (like -ic or -al) to a combing form -X- denoting as always an organ or body part, then there must be a corresponding noun formed by adding a nominative singular ending (whether regular or irregular) to that same combining form.  Thus, for example

            crani-al                        presupposes                cranium, and

            cortic-al,                                                          cortex.

Though not all of these words have been attested in English (never forget that Medical terminology is a kind of English), they do exist in Latin; and I hope it can be accepted for this argument that any Latin word naming a body part is also a real word in Medical Terminology--a word "waiting to happen," perhaps.  A generation or two ago, for example, cost-a "rib" (answering to  well-attested cost-al), and clavicul-a "collar-bone" (or "clavicle;" presupposed by clavicul-ar) were not "in the dictionary;" but they are now (although my impression is, they are still not in very general usage, in comparison to words like skelet-on or thorax).

            If this observation is accepted, then we can postulate that something analogous is the case with the "locative" subset of those adjectives, the subset which is characterized by an introductory prepositional prefix P-, and the meaning "located in the prepositional relationship to X specified by P."  Here are some examples (all "in the dictionary"):

            para-ven-ous               beside a vein

            peri-ven-ous                surrounding a vein

            endo-ven-ous              inside a vein

            The word-pattern exemplified here can be written P-X-A (where -A denotes an adjectival ending).  A further proposition arises: where X names a body part, then in the real world of concrete objects (regardless of nomenclature) there will exist a body part (or other object) describable by every single adjective of the type P-X-A.  For example, we could refer to perivenous tissue, or an endovenous blockage, or a paravenous swelling.

            To put this another way--and here comes the "gotcha!" moment--if the set of real things in the real world contains all organs or body parts named -X-, then that set also contains all real parts or objects P-X-N, that is, "a body part or object located in the prepositional relationship to X specified by P-.

            Note that we are not claiming here that the particular words generated by our three examples are actually attested (in fact, they are not, despite their transparency):

            para-ven-a                  something beside a vein

            peri-ven-a                   something surrounding a vein

            endo-ven-a                  something inside a vein

--we are only claiming that the concepts so named are well-documented; and we note in passing that the Latin noun ven-a is among those (like cost-a and patell-a, discussed above) which have been or could be used in English as well.

            At this point, let's do some actual counting, restricting ourselves for this experiment to the same three prefixes as before.  Of the fifty words we found earlier, of the pattern P-X-N, ten could be said to be "predicted" by analogous P-X-A; but there are about 225 words altogether of the shape P-X-A.  In total then, the words counted here can be said to specify 265 body parts or other objects, and to at least strongly imply their names!

            If this is confusing, let's try a slightly different approach.  Other noun-endings are of course found on words beginning P-X-, terminations denoting abstract nouns naming processes, procedures and the like.  For illustrative purposes, I counted the occurence (in our same three-prefix sample) of just one of those, those formed by the addition of the abstract noun termination -itis, namely

            P-X-ITIS          the inflammation of a body part

                                    located in the prepositional relation to X specified by P-

                                    (or, the inflammation of something involving an object

                                    located in the prepositional relation to X specified by P-);

this count (omitting words of this form possessing previously counted analogues shaped P-X-A or P-X-N) amounted to more than 50 more words.  Again, such words "predict" or presuppose a concrete noun, as in the following sequence:

            P-X-ITIS            = the inflammation of (something involving) P-X-N,

            where P-X-N    = something located in the prepositional relation to X specifed by P-;

            therefore, if P-X-ITIS is a real word, so too is P-X-N.

            To sum up, I have tried to make the case here that the existence of even one word of the form P-X-N presupposes the existence of many more of the same form; supporting evidence can be marshalled by considering that for every analogous word (in our discussion, P-X-A and P-X-ITIS) there exists a word P-X-N, and without even looking very hard we've found nearly 300 examples that would be difficult to defrock as "real words."

            But what about words of the shape P-OSTE-UM?  O yeah; next post!

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10. LATGLISH 3: THE EMPERORS' NEW POLYSYLLABLES

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)

           To sum up, the courses, textbooks and additional materials I've been involved in creating all represent an attempt to fill an educational gap caused by three features of contemporary English.  The first two have wide application to the whole of the language, while the third feature is more specifically applicable to academic English.

            1)  English is unique among modern languages in suffering a disjunction between its concrete vocabulary, which is largely native, and its abstract vocabulary, which is almost entirely borrowed from Latin and Greek.

            2) The tenuous connection between abstract vocabulary and the concrete words upon which abstract ones are built, though maintained for most of the nine hundred or so years that the problem has been with us by the near-universal learning of Latin (at least at the level of education demanded of readers and writers of "academic" material), has been broken in the last two or three generations.

            3)  To some degree at least, academics, like specialists in any area, are still more or less conscious of the benefits which come from the possession of an arcane vocabulary.

            All three features contribute to the difficulties contemporary native speakers of English have with all of their own language's abstract and technical words, but they make academic vocabularies, because of their heavy dependence on Latglish, even more difficult to learn than other specialized vocabularies or jargons.

            The first feature, at once the least understood and the most far-reaching in its implications, is perhaps the most difficult to grasp.  A further set of examples of the problem may help.  English speakers are on safe ground if we "grasp" a "point" during a discussion, because both "grasp" and "point" are concrete words used abstractly here but with clear connections of meaning to their concrete denotations.  If, on the other hand, we "comprehend" an "idea" or "perceive" the "argument," we are in a realm of abstraction without obvious connection to tangible reality.

            Let's consider only the verbs.  When we "grasp" an idea, the metaphorical extension of meaning from the physical act of "grasping" an object is clear and appropriate; its clarity and appropriateness are further helped by the existence of well-known cognate or parallel abstractions such as "grapple with," "seize on," "take hold of" and "come to grips with."

            When we "comprehend," on the other hand, we may be dimly aware that our action is related to that expressed by the word "apprehend," but we have no way of knowing, without special training in Latin or etymology, that both words derive from Latin "prehendo" meaning "I grasp" or "I seize," and that we are therefore using the same metaphorical extension of meaning as in the previous example.  Similarly, if we "perceive," or "conceive," or understand a "concept," we are making use of a nearly identical metaphor ("-ceive-" and "-cept-" derive from Latin "capio" meaning "I seize" or "I take"), but again without being able to connect it by meaning to a physical act denoted by a cognate word in the world of concrete objects.  The native speaker of Latin, to put this another way, would not suffer the English speaker's disjunction between abstract "comprehend," "apprehend" and "conceive" on the one hand and the concrete act of physically "grasping" or "seizing" on the other, because "prehendo" and "capio" were used of that physical act as well as in their metaphorically extended senses.           Similarly, a contemporary German speaker would find no disjunction between the abstract verb "begreifen" ("to comprehend" or "to understand") and cognate concrete words like "greifen" ("to grab" or "to grasp") and "Griff" ("handle; thing grasped").  Finally, French "comprendre" ("to comprehend") clearly derives, with no disjunction, from "prendre" ("to take").

            Thus native speakers of English are often handicapped, in a way that speakers of the above-mentioned languages are not, if confronted with an unfamiliar word from the same root as one we already know ("prehensile" may serve as an example in the present context) or even by a word we do know if it is used in an unfamiliar way ("reprehensible," for example): since our language lacks a cognate concrete word, or a use of the same root to denote something physical and real, we have no image to refer back to in order to guess the meaning of a word or in order to remember its meaning once learned.  We must rely upon context alone if we are to guess, and memory alone if we are to remember.  Even so, the lack of a "root" and unifying concept can result in memory and context seeming to run counter to one another, as in the following examples:

            He comprehends the problem.

            He apprehends the criminal.

            He is apprehensive.

            The book is comprehensive.

            The action is reprehensible.

            My second point, that the disjunction between English abstract and concrete vocabulary has been worsened by the cessation of that almost universal knowledge of latin that prevailed until very recently among those who claim to be educated, need not be labored.  It does however need to be pointed out.  This is because the advantages of knowing Latin in terms of the enhancement of one's understanding of English vocabulary are, for most of those few people who do know Latin, unconscious ones, while for those who do not know Latin those advantages are, by definition, not knowable at all.  Latin has dropped out of the curriculum, almost silently; where a clamor has arisen, the vital problem of disjunction between abstract and concrete vocabulary has not formed a large part of the protest.  This is not to suggest that the resuscitation of Latin would in itself solve the problem: a knowledge of Latin provides only the material from which connections may be drawn between words in English, but does not in itself confer the ability to explicate Latglish.  In practice, the only solution to this growing problem of communication--this gap, this disjunction--is going to be specialized study of English etymology, of the kind this blog is dedicated to fostering.

            My final point, that academic vocabularies to a greater extent than other jargons confer benefits of some kind upon their initiates, may be disputed.  But words do have power, and always have had.  Some, in contemporary English, have so much power that few of us can bring ourselves even to utter them, in "polite company" at least.  Again, the idea in primitive magic that learning the name of something gives one power over it may persist in what used to be our fairly widespread reluctance to share our middle, or secret, names, except with intimates.

            So practitioners of academic specialities, knowing the special names of things, may have in the eyes of many of the rest of us a kind of power over the things themselves; in addition, in order for the special names to be efficacious they must remain secret or arcane, the property of a select few....or is it perhaps just that the Emperors' new clothes are no clothes at all, and that in academia we sometimes find ourselves pretending that we all--students and professors alike--really can see through to the meanings inherent in the lovely Latglish we clothe ourselves in?

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9. LATGLISH 2: FLIPPING THE TOGA?

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)

            So "orth-odont-ist-s" rub shoulders with "dent-ic-ian-s," while "in-dent-at-ion-s" (and plain old "dents" in your fender) frolic among the "dan-de-lion-s"-- an earlier age might have called all these tooth-words "Latin-ish."  "Latglish," by contrast, is a word new and harsh enough to give offence--which the semantic problem we are talking about here ought to do.  For it is not just that 60% of our vocabulary consists of word parts inconsistently borrowed and stuck together from foreign sources; the real problem is illustrated by several contrasting features of Latin and English vocabulary, which (as I could put it if I wanted to baffle you with Latglish) Latglish vocabulary mediates nonsymmetrically:

LATIN WORDS                LATGLISH WORDS        "PURE" ENGLISH WORDS

mostly poly-syllabic               mostly poly-syllabic                mostly mono-syllabic

highly inflected                       partly inflected                        mostly un-inflected

both concrete and abstract     mostly abstract                       mostly concrete

            Don't be alarmed by the Latglish bafflegab.  In (mostly) plain English, let's say that observable contrasts in terms of three features (word-length, degree of inflection, and degree of abstraction) are distributed unevenly over a range of word-types which can be represented as follows (the added examples will with any luck make these observations clearer; note that "--" indicates that no word occupies this set of coordinates):

PURE                             PURE                    MIXED                   PURE

LATIN                       LATGLISH            LATGLISH             ENGLISH

crani-um                      crani-um                    crani-um/skull             skull

fract-ura crani-alis        crani-al fract-ure        skull fract-ure             skull break

carp-us                        --                               --                              wrist

os carp-al-e                 --                               carp-al bone              wrist bone

oss-a carp-al-ia           "carp-al-ia"                 carp-al-s                    wrist bones

--                                 skelet-on                   --                               --

            To guide you through this list, the first line reflects the fact that the Latin word "cranium" (borrowed early from Greek "kranion" and fully "Latinized") was borrowed into English where it can be used on its own (as a fully "Englished" word) or as a synonym coexisting with the native English word "skull."  Notice in examining the second line that while you can say "skull fracture" in a mixture of English and Latglish, you would normally say "crani-al fracture" rather than "crani-um fracture" in the very best Latglish; but you would never say "skull-ish break" even in the purest of English.

            Again, although Latglish "cranium" and English "skull" are used interchangeably (although an anatomist might give you an argument about this, in terms of the potentially different scopes of the two words), the second group of lines illustrates the fact that an English speaker wouldn't understand you if you called a body part the "carpus;" medical people actually do call the bones which make up the wrist the "carpals" but few of them would recognize "carpalia," and fewer still would understand that the word "carp-al-s" is using the regular English plural morpheme "-s" to translate the Latin neuter plural adjectival ending "-alia."

            Finally, if the latter sequence suggests that there might actually be three "grades" of Latglish (from purest Latglish to most English-ed, these would be represented by "carpalia," "carpals" and "carpal bones," respectively), the opposite extreme is exemplified by "skeleton," a Greek neuter adjective (describing a thing which is "dried up") borrowed almost directly into Latglish (though we usually call such words "Neolatin"), with no Latin or English equivalent at all.

            A shared feature of the Latglish nouns is that (unlike their English equivalents, where these exist) when they are used as adjectives their endings usually change: just as we would never call something a "wrist-y" problem in English, we would be much more likely to refer to skelet-al disorders than "skeleton" ones.  To mention one last complication in this particular context, however, this aspect of Latglish is changing in our lifetimes so that an increasing number of non-inflected adjectivalizations are becoming normal.  A few examples follow, showing this particular feature in terms of the "purity" of the Latglish:

PURE LATGLISH                      ENGLISHED LATGLISH

skelet-al problems                          skelet-on problems

cancer-ous tissue                            cancer research

muscul-ar dystrophy                       muscle tissue

hyperglycem-ic syndrome               hypercalcemia syndrome

            It bears repeating that this set of contrasts represents change-in-progress, in the same way as the plural forms of Latglish nouns are changing before our eyes and might invite all kinds of dispute: as, you might say "formulae" where I would say "formulas;" your "radiuses" are my "radii;" today I say "indexes" and tomorrow "indices;" and no one believes me when I get up on my pedantic high horse and assert that if it is one octopus then it must be two "octopodes," even though I might be quite happy counting my platypuses.

            This is all the more worth mentioning because, while the (mostly pedantic and therefore trivial) distinctions between Latin and English concrete-noun plurals rarely cause problems of interpretation, the blurred distinction between nouns and adjectives can be especially confusing, particularly in the case of polysyllabic abstract Latglish nouns, which as we will see by means of the next set of examples are both the most numerous and the most all-around troublesome of all Latglish words.

            Before proceeding, note in relation to the previous lists that while "cranium" and "skull" are in wide usage as synonymous terms, and while most people if they gave it a moment's thought would probably realize that "fracture" and "break" mean the same thing, it takes special training in scientific or medical terminology to recognize that the "carpal" bones (or "carpals") have anything at all to do with the wrist.  We might say, therefore, that there is no "pure English" word that can be called "interchangeable with" or "equivalent to" Latglish "carpals" (although of course we have a pure English "translation," namely "wrist-bones").  With this distinction in mind, let's look at another set of Latglish words, from which arise a further set of troubles:

LATIN                     LATGLISH          ENGLISH              TRANSLATION

WORD                       WORD           EQUIVALENT       OF THE LATGLISH

                                                                 WORD                      WORD

test-is 1                       --                                  --                       "a witness"

test-is 2                       test                                --                       "witnesser"

test-ament-um             test-ament                      --                     "a witnessing"

--                                test-amon-ial                  --                       "a witnessing"

in-test-at-us                 in-test-at-e                    --                       "un-witness-ed"

--                                in-test-ac-y                    --                       "un-witness-ed-ness"

pro-test-ari                  pro-test                         --                       "forth-witness"

--                                pro-test-or                     --                       "forth-witness-er"

--                                pro-test-at-ion-s            --                       "forth-witness-ings"

at-test-ar-i                   at-test                           --                       "toward-witness"

con-test-ans                con-test-ant                   --                       "together-witness-ing"

de-test-abil-is              de-test-abl-e                 --                       "down-witness-able"

--                                de-test-abil-ity              --              "down-witness-able-ness"

            Notice here among other things that while a few (mostly abstract) Latglish words do not have actual Latin antecedents (and many of the Latin antecedents that do exist are rare and/or late), none of them have obviously synonymous and commonly used English equivalents.  Notice especially that although the Latglish words listed here are only a small subset of all of the words in English made from this Latin root, no Latglish word "test" exists that easily anchors all of the compound forms: you cannot say, "the *TEST testified about the testimony of the protestor," you have to say "the WITNESS" did so.

            As for the word designating the kind of "witness-er" that you write to get into Law School, while it is a concrete enough word it's meaning has been abstracted far enough from the root idea of "witness" that it doesn't serve very well to clarify the meanings of the others in the group.  And how far would you get if you tried to figure out what the male body part called a "witness-let" or "witness-ling" (Latglish "test-icle," from Modern Latin "glandula test-icul-aris;" the Romans called the body part simply "testis," or "the witness," ) had to do with getting into Law School?

            Don't feel too bad if you don't have a quick answer, by the way; no one else does either. The two leading theories are that, 1) because women were not allowed to "test-ify" (to "make witness") in court, a quick flip of the toga--a flashing, as it were--might sometimes be required (the "testimony" of slaves was unadmissable too, unless of course they were tortured; but that's a whole different story); or 2) that since there were no bibles yet in the Roman world, the "test-ifi-er" would have to grab something or another, to swear by--take your pick!

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8. DESPERATE DISORDERS

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; copyright 1993; ISBN 978-1-988941-240; to be revised by Stiles and Russell 2017)

DESPERATE DISORDERS
(Or, Desperate Remedies for Desperate Diseases?)

                For a little comic relief, here are some actual student errors made on exams, most of which I collected in my early days of being involved in the teaching of Medical Terminology and trying to figure out how students might be taught just a little bit better.  On a serious note, error analysis being one of the best ways of teaching this material, I am happy to report that since writing the The Anatomyof Medical Terminology I haven't been able to add items to this list as often as part of me would still like to!

                The errors are all real; in some cases I've edited for clarity.

                The ones presented here (about a third of the collection) fall into one major category, which could be described as "Errors of Conception or Usage."  They seem to be further dividable, into the following subcategories:

                Errors involving an English word used in a wrong sense

                Erroneous choice of the wrong English word, two meanings being possible

                Numerical misconception

                Misperception of relationships between word-parts

                                reversal of order

                                other errors of "modification"

The words below are presented in order of these subcategories.  As a "homework assignment," see if the boundaries of these groupings are as obvious to you as they once seemed to me.  Enjoy!

retro-graphy                       the recording of the behind

eu-toc-ia                            an abnormal condition of goodness in children

necro-sperm-ia                  an abnormal condition involving deadly sperm

necr-ectomy                      excision causing death

chromo-rhin-orrhea            the flowing of colors from the nose

meso-nas-al                       pertaining to a medium nose

dent-iparous                      pertaining to the (proper) bearing of one's teeth

cerat-itis                            horny inflammation

                         (or)          inflammation with horn-shaped lumps

dextro-card-ia                   a condition involving a right-handed heart

peri-xen-itis                       inflammation when around a stranger

tricho-card-ia                    a condition characterized by a hair-like heart

                         (or)          an abnormal condition involving hearty hair

cystido-trachel-otomy       the cutting of the neck and bladder

post-hepat-itic                  behind (= causing) the inflammation of the liver

sarc-omphalo-cele            the protrusion of a fleshy navel

nephel-opia                      a visual fixation on clouds

hippo-uria                        the abnormal presence of horses in the urine

hypo-orchid-ia                 an abnormal condition of being below the testicles

anthropo-phagy               the swallowing of humans

orth-uria                          the abnormal presence of straight things in the urine

hyper-calci-uria               the abnormal presence of calcium in something above urine

karyo-phage                   one who eats the nuclei of cells

brachy-uran-ic                pertaining to a short sky

sinistro-ocular                 pertaining to the left eyes

null-ipara                        a mother who has borne no children

oligo-phren-ia                 a condition involving few diaphragms

chrono-gnosis                 an abnormal condition involving chronological knowledge

erythro-phag-ia               a condition of turning red while eating

homo-gam-ous                pertaining to the same marriage

galact-emia                      the abnormal presence of milk in the blood

irid-emia                          the abnormal presence of iris fragments in the blood

leuko-cyt-uria                  the abnormal presence of urine in white blood cells

tricho-gloss-ia                  an abnormal condition of the tongue in the hair

tricho-myc-osis                an abnormal condition involving hairy fungi

gyneco-mania                   female insanity

trichocardia                      an abnormal condition of the hair, involving the heart

necr-ectomy                    death by excision

antro-neuro-lysis              the disintegration of the cavities of the nerves

heter-esthesia                   the perception of oneself as different

pyo-pneumo-cholecyst-itis        

                                        the inflammation of gall bladder, lungs and pus

anti-nephr-it-ic                 pertaining to the inflammation of the part up against the kidneys

                         (or)         pertaining to an inflammation operating against the kidney

litho-phone                      a stone instrument for hearing

acro-cephal--ia               an abnormal condition of the extremities being in the head

pseudochrom-esthest-ic

                                      pertaining to the perception that one has been falsely colored

pseudo-encephalo-malacia
                                     the softening of a false brain

myxo-en-chondr-oma   a tumor involving the cartilage inside the mucous membranes

quint-ipara                    five things beside one another

(More available on demand!)

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7. TO MY LOYAL READERS....A DRAFT SIDEBAR

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; copyright 1993; ISBN 978-1-988941-240; to be revised by Stiles and Russell 2017)

            This means all four of you, assuming any subset of you is still here!

            I've heard tell a great thing about blogland is, you can have a "sidebar" ? in/on which you can organize the various posts in various ways, and even a statement (or link thereto) of at what and for whom the blog is intended.  I haven't been able to find this yet; but with faith in it's reality (!), here's a draft.

            At the most bloody-minded level, the purpose of the blog is to show anyone studying this material with anyone other than Stephen or me that we can offer them something considerably better than what they've currently got.  My fond hope is that web-surfing students looking for help with their homework will find it and then nag their teachers into checking us out; and to that end many of the posts will (eventually) be designed to be actually helpful in a direct way to those students, regardless of the book and methods they are using.

            But the real audience, at this level, is the teachers, primarily those specifically teaching Medical Terminology but also those grappling more generally with Latglish (whether broadly, in so-called "Roots" courses, or more narrowly in courses on Legal or Scientific Terminology); I am hoping that these readers will find most of the posts interesting and useful in one way or another.   Classicists especially, but also Deans of Humanities, are invited to be impressed.

            At a slightly higher level of bloody-mindedness, the purpose of the blog is to assert forcefully that the teaching of Medical Terminology is best done by classicists and other historical linguists (the people who used to be called Philologists), rather than by medical people, because as life-long students of words we see and can understand and explain more things about them--more useful things--than users of those words typically can, even (or especially) those word-users whose life-long expertise is the body parts, ailments and cures which the words themselves name.  (There will be a post or two on this subject, sooner rather than later!)

            In these terms, students and teachers involved in courses in which non-philologists present human anatomy along with lists of the word-parts (and examples of whole words) used in the field will probably find this blog less than helpful; these courses (and the textbooks used in them), though invoking "medical terminology," are actually teaching something a bit different.  (This claim will also generate a post; it will be related to the ones about the difference between learning what a word describes in the world, on the one hand, and what that word tells you about itself, on the other; I will be asserting that the latter is quite a bit closer to solving the vexed question of what a word "means!")

            In other words, a major purpose of this blog is to claim turf.

            Finally, I still have faith that if I can write the damn posts carefully enough then I can say some things which will be interesting to the famous (but surely not mythical?) "educated general reader" who reckons language among the things worth knowing something about.  If it were a book I'd want it to be one of those books people like me find at places like Prince's Bookstore here in Hamilton--a specialist's carefully edited account of a specialized subject, carefully designed for the educated non-specialist.

            And besides all that, I need a home for the unpublished article Bill Sargeant (a paleontologist) and I wrote about the sad state of biological nomenclature, and for the dinosaur names more generally, and the scripts of all the videos, and the draft introduction and sample letter ("-P-", I think) of the Etymological Dictionary of Medical Terminology, and....

            And, so far, this is just the one sock-puppet!

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6. SPECIES MEDICAL TERMINOLOGY; GENUS LATGLISH

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2017; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)

           

            So why "Latglish?"  Partly out of frustration.  It is difficult to find useful terminology when discussing the fact that contemporary English vocabulary is riddled with polysyllabic words which are not native to our branch of the Germanic languages and which are made up of word-parts (morphemes) some (but not necessarily all) of which were once word-parts in Latin (although some of those began life in ancient Greek, and others were snatched into English from languages like French which developed out of Classical Latin).

            To put this more technically, English is a Germanic language, sharing near ancestry with German, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish (among others); it is also an Indo-European language, sharing remote ancestry with (among many others) both Latin and Greek, and it is therefore even more distantly connected to the Latin-derived Romance languages (most importantly for our purposes, French, Spanish and Italian).  But despite this, an actual word count reveals that once you get past the most commonly used 3 or 4 thousand words in English, about 60% of the remaining 100 thousand or so words (estimates of the total vary) contain at least one (usually more than one) morpheme (or "meaningful word-part") which was at one time or another a Latin (or Greco-Latin) word-part. What to call these words?  Latin?  But they are not.  Latinate?  Better, but a bit vague.

            Rather than calling them something like, "English words made up of one or more parts which have been borrowed from Latin or Romance (some of which may have been earlier borrowed from Greek), and to which non-Latin (mostly Germanic) word-parts and patterns of combination either have been or may be applied," let's just say "Latglish" (a blend of one Latinate--not Latin!--word, and one English one)--it's shorter.  

            For illustrations of some of the problems we are trying to deal with here, consider the following statements:

                        I think therefore I live.

                        cogito ergo vivo.

The first is "English" not only in the sense that all the words in it are native to our language but also because all the morphemes in it (including "there" and "fore") are native; the second sentence is called "Latin" for the same reasons.  But "ergo" is also an English word, a rare type, borrowed whole without even phonetic modification; it could therefore be called "a Latin word borrowed into English."

            English "cogit-at-e" and "cogit-at-ion" on the other hand clearly contain Latinate parts (the morphemes cogit-, -at- and -ion-; the fact that cogit- itself breaks into co-, an allomorph of the Latin prefix cum-, -g-, an allomorph of the verb ag-ere, and -it-, an allomorph of -at- doesn't even have to slow us down).   So "cogit-at-ion" could be called "Latinate," rather than "Latin," given that the word in that form never existed in Latin.  But the -e of "cogit-at-e" had no place in Latin at all--should we then call this word "Latinate-oid?"

            Similarly, even though "viv-id", "re-viv-e" and "con-viv-ial-ity" contain a Latinate morpheme (meaning "live"), they all end in non-Latin ways, while "viv-if-ic-at-ion," "viv-i-sect-ion" and "sur-viv-al-ist" would puzzle Caesar and Cicero even though most of the parts are Latinate (-ist however comes from Greek), because the parts involved were never used in those particular combinations in Latin.  "Vit-amin," "vict-ual-s" (with its derivative "vitt-el-s") "re-vit-al-iz-at-ion-al-ism," and "vit-al-ity," although they each contain versions of -vit- (itself an allomorph of -viv-), provoke similar difficulties.

            To oversimplify in the interests of driving some of these points home, one of the ironies is that one of the few ways you cannot write Latglish "cogitation" in Latin is "cogitation"--the permissible Latin forms, which depend upon the word's context, are "cogitatio, cogitationis, cogitationi, cogitationem, cogitatione," and in the plural "cogitationes, cogitationum" and "cogitationibus."  "Vivid" is even worse, appearing in Latin as "vividus, vivida, vividum, vivide, vivido, vividi, vividae, vividam, vividorum, vividarum, vividis, vividos and vividas" but not ever as plain ordinary "vivid."

            Nor would the sounds we make when saying Latglish out loud be familiar to the gentlemen who called each other--to spell their names quasi-phonetically--Kikero and Kaesar (the Germans got the pronunciation of Kaiser right when they borrowed Caesar's name as a title).  To take only the easier of the two sets of examples above, all of the words we pronounce with the "v" sound were, for the Romans, "w" sounds: Iulius Kaesar did not say "veni, vidi, vici"--although that is what he wrote; what he said was something like "wanee, weedee, weekee."  The Latglish words "vivid" and "convivival" are thus very different from the Latin word parts pronounced "wiwid-" and "conwiwial-."

            To illustrate just one further complication let's look at some Latglish words derived from Latinate versions of the classical morpheme meaning "tooth."  Along with Latinate-ish "dent-ist-ry" (one Latin, one Greek, and one Germanic morpheme), we have in English "peri-odont-ic-s" in which the second of two Greek morphemes is cognate with Latinate -dent- (and with English tooth!), while -ic- occurs in both Greek and Latin, and -s is the regular English plural, but used here either as a translation or an analogue of Latin and Greek plural morphemes; and in the name of the flower or weed called "tooth-of-lion," dan- comes from a French version of Latin dent-.  Speaking of metaphor (which we haven't even begun to, yet), you can probably see by now why the first word of this paragraph is said to be "in-dent-ed!"

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