15. NOISY WORDS AND QUIET WORDS

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

NOISY WORDS AND QUIET WORDS

                At the risk of re-inventing the wheel, I'm going to postulate here that there are two kinds of words in the world.  The words involved happen to be relatively shorter or longer than each other, but that is not the point; in the case of English, words in the first group tend to be native to the language while the other group mostly consists of Latglish--but that's not the point either.

                No, the point (however simple-minded this sounds) is that some words have only one "moving part"--that is, one meaningful part, which under the right circumstances, might or might not show up as one part of one or more of the other kind of words, the ones which consist of two or more re-useable elements of meaning.  If you are comfortable with the vocabularies of Morphology, I'm talking about the kinds of words often called single free morphemes on the one hand, and words made up of more than one morpheme on the other; or if we want to pretend we all understand extreme Latglish, we could call them unimorphemic versus polymorphemic.

                But let's not.  Let's keep it simple.  Let's even risk re-inventing wheels other people have ridden madly off in all directions on before now.  The wheel I want to ride off on (and therefore I have to invent it: doesn't everyone?) is (you won't be surprised) the polymorphemic one; and the starting point of this particular "there are two kinds of X in the world" statement is that words of the first type are practically mute when it comes to telling us useful things about themselves.

                This is another way of saying that such words are "arbitrary" or "unmotivated" (see a century or two of Linguistic debate, beginning with the stunning epiphany that it is only in English that dogs say "bow-wow"); they prove the point that there is no inherent relation between the symbol (the word) and its real-world referent (the thing referred to or symbolized by the word).  This premise is so well accepted in the world of those who study words that it sometimes encourages us to overlook the other type of word entirely.

                To take a familiar example (familiar to readers of those, from Plato to Wittgenstein and beyond, who write about what I think is called "category theory"), the word "chair" names an object but tells us nothing at all about itself beyond its name.   The fact that everyone in the world seems to grasp all in a rush at a very early age the "category" we English-speakers call "chair," so as to be able not only to authoritatively pronounce any object in the universe to be either a chair or not a chair, but also to describe any given example of one as either a good or a less good example of the category--well, this why the concept of "category" is fascinating, but it isn't our point here.

                If words like "chair" or "cat" or "game" or "love" are nearly mute, in these terms--if they tell us next to nothing useful about themselves, words of the other type often speak loudly.   Even if I didn't know what chair means, the word chairlessness tells me a good deal--it names the very abstract condition of being without whatever a chair is.  The word pussycat--say in contrast to alleycat--"tells" me something that the plain ordinary old word cat does not--and alleycat is even louder!  With Wittgenstein, we might not be able to define or delimit the category game (while being perfectly well able to distinguish between members and non-members of the category); but the four meaningful parts of game-s-man-ship, taken together, quite loudly describe the abstract ability belonging to a hypothetical human who is good at achieving the goals appropriate to most if not all games.  Finally--and to edge us closer to a medical context--love-sick-ness tells us that, as a word, it names the abstract state of suffering an illness in relation to or because of that thing called love--and of course we all know what the word love means (even if the word itself is mute about this)!

                These last two examples, in fact, bring us close to something perhaps paradoxical: because of the information about itself which the complex word tells us, we may actually be able to understand it better than we can the simple word--the arbitrary category name!  I think I might be able to even apply this distinction to the examples involving cats (if not chairs); but I'm not sure, because my head is beginning to hurt.

                Now, during the Golden Age of Latglish (roughly, from the era of Linnaeus and William Harvey until about 1950--see a forthcoming blogpost!), as in other utopiae all was always well (in the best of all possible worlds...).  More specifically, words were well-behaved in addition to being well-formed; they flickered into existence quietly, at need, with no controversy as to their "reality" or "validity" (because they were so well-formed); I almost want to say, they were seen but not heard!

                But of course, the truth is that they were heard; in fact most of them told their users a great deal, because those users--both coiners and interpreters of the words--were all speaking (and listening to) the same language.

                More technically, during this "golden age," everyone involved in the life-sciences and medicine knew Latglish in its full range--from Classical Latin at the one extreme, all the way through the spectrum to Biological Nomenclature and Medical Terminology at two of the others.  Thus, as "native speakers," they both coined and recognized new words at will, and--because of the linguistic competency of the users--these words were generally "valid," in the sense that any given word was usually used to describe what intuitive analysis of it in terms of its meaningful parts would suggest it should be describing.

                To put this all a different way, for centuries, until quite recently, users of Medical Terminology did not "look words up"--they didn't have to; they simply produced them as circumstances demanded, from the combining forms and patterns of combination available to them in their heads, by virtue of their native-speaker fluency in Latglish in all its varieties.  And they read them the same way, effortlessly understanding any new combination used by anyone else operating out of the same basic knowledge of patterns and word-parts.

                I am of course speaking here of our second category of words, the complex ones, the ones which sometimes almost seem to shout their meanings out at us.  For even at the beginning of the Golden Age, pretty much all of the major body parts and substances had perfectly good Latin names already (which already had been, or else could be with no conscious thought or effort, englished in various ways), of the mute sort.  This was also true of the names of common plants and animals (with their major parts) when Linnaeus started categorizing them.

                One effect of all this on today's vocabulary is that most of the words in Medical Terminology which describe concrete objects are words of the first type--single-morpheme utterances which function well as the arbitrarily chosen names of tangible things, but which are otherwise essentially mute.

                Note in passing that even this is not strictly true: for example, the most frequently used combining form translating what we call blood in plain English, namely hemat-, not only names the familiar substance (by means of a--to us contemporaries--unfamiliar Latglish term), but it also "tells us" that the "blood" which it names is specifically the gunk found in the human body; it is emphatically not the material referred to in phrases like "bad blood between us," or "in the blood," or "the bloodlines of the horse."  Metaphor is stripped away by translation here, as it were.  Thus the effect is of a "narrowing" rather than of a "widening"--hemat- denotes something even more narrowly "real" or concrete than blood.

                "Categorically" different are the polymorphemic words naming the generally more abstract conditions, abnormalities and processes that go wrong with the concrete body bits, as well as the (also usually more abstract) medical procedures or treatments for dealing with these.  Such words are built almost always with reference to at least one of the concrete-object names.  Thus they regularly contain two types of combining form, one type naming the body part (or other more-or-less concrete thing) affected, and another naming the particular condition, process or procedure.

                The point of all of this is that such words--the ones with more morphemes--are far from being "arbitrary" or "unmotivated;" in fact, they are so highly "motivated"--they tell us so much about themselves--that they are (of course) transparent of interpretation when encountered.  More surprisingly, the "best of them" are also so "predictable" in their formation that any two or more native speakers of the language involved have a good chance of creating the same word, given a precise enough description of the real-world thing for which a word is needed.

                To use an obvious example, no native speaker of English would fail to understand the polymorphemic word head-ache-y; similarly, given the description "sort of like pain afflicting the body part found above the neck or back of the eyes" most native speakers would generate (or to use the linguistic term "produce") the same word.  More to our point in this blogpost, native speakers of the full glorious range of Latglish referred to above--inhabitants of the "Golden Age of Latglish"--would similarly both produce and transparently interpret the word cephal-alg-ic, a word which tells us loud and clear that it means (as we are at pains to teach our students to hear and then write) "pertaining to pain in the head."  That is, it means the same thing as head-ache-y--but why would you ever bother with a homey, low-class word like that once you've tasted the giddy delights of fluent Latglish?

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