mjhjmtu

I'm from China and I would like to ask English native speakers whether a non-medical professional understands medical terms? Examples:

1. rhinorrhea


2. rhinitis


3. laryngoscopy


4. laryngitis


5. laryngostenosis


6. bronchiectasis


7. bronchopathy


8. bronchospasm


9. pneumothorax


10. pneumonitis


11. pulmonologist


12. pulmonary or pulmonic


13. dyspnea


14. bradypnea


15. tachypnea


16. apnea


17. rhinoplasty


18. thoracocentesis or thoracentesis


19. pulmonectomy or pneumonectomy


20. tracheostomy

So do people with a high school degree readily understand the above terms?

I'm trying to compare language learning difficulties between Chinese and other languages.

I know that in China, a person with middle school or even primary school education can understand those terms in Chinese(at least the general meaning)

For my personal experience, I've been learning and using English on a daily basis for 20 years and yet I'm ashamed to say that I look completely lost in front of these words. The explanation for my ignorance of medical terms could be that I've never been or lived in any English speaking country so I'm not exposed to daily language.

What do you think?

Translation is a difficult task. Cultures are different, situations are different, histories are different.

English is interesting because it has a mixed heritage for many medical terms. For many medical situations there is a basic English term, and there is a Latin technical term, and there might possibly be a Greek or even another Latin term. Part of a physicians training (in the US at least) is learning how to convert a patient's words into the less vague, Latinate technical terms (this is called ).

Most English speaking people don't have education in Latin or Greek, so most of those terms are etymologically opaque. (there's actually a bit of obscurantism, either suspected by the patient or intentional by the clinician). The patient may well have heard a commercial so they have an idea that 'rhinitis' is something like a cold but they will just say 'my nose is stuffed up'. But 'dyspnea'? The patient may say they have trouble breathing, but they won't recognize the term 'dyspnea' if they see what the doc is writing down.

My limited perception of Mandarin Chinese is that medical terms are in general 'transparent'. The English label 'pulmonologist' is usually rendered in Chinese as '肺科医生' which is more literally 'lung (department) doctor'. English speakers know 'lung' and 'doctor', but 'pulmono-' is just as foreign as the Chinese is to them (they may have trouble pronouncing it even).

Of your list above, the following are understandable by the general populace (who haven't experienced the problem personally):

• laryngitis - a common enough thing


• apnea - a popular notion


• rhinoplasty - elective plastic surgery is as common in the US as in China, so this is a well known synonym for 'nose job'


• tracheostomy - every other movie comedy seems to have a scene where the protagonist has to perform an emergency tracheostomy on some one choking in a restaurant because they saw how to do it on TV

All the other words on the list are technical terms. Most high-school graduates would never have seen these terms before but could guess at the meanings with some non-trivial accuracy. However these words should all be explained to non-medical readers in the US.

This is not to say that the education system in the US is not teaching students the right things. At some point, the basic English vocabulary just does not cover the explosion of technical scientific minutiae in medicine so it only takes years of higher learning (medical school) to master these terms. It's just that the culture (and the word forming tradition of English culture) lends itself to using obscure Latin and Greek rather than simpler already known Germanic roots.

(a more quantitative way to say this would be to give you their frequency in non-medical contexts. All these terms I'd expect to be well out of the top 20-30K working vocabulary of most US adults)

People with some knowledge of classical languages such as Greek and Latin can usually work out what those terms mean. For example 'rhin' refers to the the nose and 'tachy' means speedy.

Biologists too should be able to make a good guess.

These days, a classical education is relatively rare and so I suspect the majority of the population would only know these words if they or a close friend or relative had suffered from such a condition.