(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
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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