The English of the Health Sciences: A Note on Foreign Borrowings

Abstract

With medicine having a long, more than 2500-year-old history, it seems obvious that different nations must have contributed to its development, which has been accompanied by the creation of the terminology necessary to describe the discoveries made and to express the concepts that evolved in the course of this development. From the point of view of their linguistic origin, medical terms may have been built by applying the rules of their own code (the language of medicine), by borrowing words from other sub-codes (the language of computer science or statistics), or by borrowing words from foreign languages. This study analyses the third type of borrowings, i.e. words adopted from other cultures through medical English.