4 ms·

Loved your thought process and walk through linguistics. I’d have to take exception to the medical examples however - I’m not sure if the translation is ‘a li

Loved your thought process and walk through linguistics. I’d have to take exception to the medical examples however - I’m not sure if the translation is ‘a liquid swelling in the lung’ or ‘liquid swelling in the lung’ both of which are technically incorrect, one more than the other. In actual fact the English is highly descriptive, just not in layman’s terms, and you need to learn another whole vocabulary in order to understand it. This is beneficial because medicine is a highly technical. We were told in our first day of med school that we would learn around 5000 words by the time we were done. You can be come conversant in most languages with much less than that. The Chinese example you’re providing (I have no idea if that’s the term Chinese doctors would use in their notes) seems more akin to how I would describe pulmonary oedema to a patient or family member - ‘you have water on your lungs’

ralferoo 3y ago
> I’m not sure if the translation is ‘a liquid swelling in the lung’ or ‘liquid swelling in the lung’ both of which are technically incorrect, one more than the other. I'm not really sure of the difference between these two, but I'm not a doctor so any liquid in the lungs sounds bad to me! But I probably also translated it wrongly, as Chinese grammar is kind of different to English anyway. In Chinese, there's no real difference between "a something", "the something" and just "something", although you could say "one something" if you particularly want to indicate a single item. The actual characters are 肺水肿, where 肺 (fei4) is a noun that means lung, 水 (shui3) is a noun that usually means water, but also often just liquid generally, and 肿 (zhong3) which could be a noun meaning a swelling or bump, or a verb meaning to swell. According to my dictionary, 水肿 together means oedema or "having an excess of watery fluid", but like I say I've only heard this word in English and never really knew what it was, because I've never needed to know, so that was really the point - that the Chinese word is naturally more descriptive. In general, the way this word is formed, the 肺 (lung) at the start as a noun followed by another noun, generally means that the first noun provides the context, and the second noun provides more detail, which is why I translated it as "in the lung". It's not really the correct translation as literally "swelling in the lung" would be more precisely "肺里的水肿" where 里 means "inside" and 的 is kind of like 's. A guess the more natural understanding of 肺水肿 would be "pertaining to the lung, excess of fluid". But, I don't think this kind of explicitness is unique to this, for instance "pneumonia" is 肺炎, which is the same 肺 (fei4) lung and 炎 (yan2) which means inflammation or flame as a noun or hot as an adjective. As an aside, while I've seen both meanings of the word before, I've only just realised that it's kind of odd that inflammation (which I associate more as swelling and not heat) and flame is actually common to both meanings in English as well. Looking up other words with 炎, gives me 肾炎 which is 肾 (shen4) meaning kidney and 炎 (yan2) meaning inflammation. Again, I've never once heard "nephritis" in English, and would have no idea how to guess at its meaning, but it's kind of obvious from the Chinese meaning. Similarly "gastritis" (at least I know this one!) is 胃炎 where 胃 (wei4) means stomach and "dermatitis" is 皮炎 where 皮 (pi2) is skin. There's a bunch more similar ones, but I think the pattern is obvious. I'm sure Chinese probably does have some random and non-obvious medical words that I haven't come across, but most of the ones I have learned aren't necessarily obvious until you know them, but are easy to remember afterwards, e.g. "having a fever" is 发烧 where 发 (fa1) means to send out and 烧 (shao1) means to burn. Oh, and yeah 5000 words is a lot of extra vocabulary! I'm still only around 4000 words in Chinese and I can survive most conversations and usually explain what word I mean even if I don't know what the word is!

ralferoo 3y ago

> I’m not sure if the translation is ‘a liquid swelling in the lung’ or ‘liquid swelling in the lung’ both of which are technically incorrect, one more than the other. I'm not really sure of the difference between these two, but I'm not a doctor so any liquid in the lungs sounds bad to me! But I probably also translated it wrongly, as Chinese grammar is kind of different to English anyway. In Chinese, there's no real difference between "a something", "the something" and just "something", although you could say "one something" if you particularly want to indicate a single item. The actual characters are 肺水肿, where 肺 (fei4) is a noun that means lung, 水 (shui3) is a noun that usually means water, but also often just liquid generally, and 肿 (zhong3) which could be a noun meaning a swelling or bump, or a verb meaning to swell. According to my dictionary, 水肿 together means oedema or "having an excess of watery fluid", but like I say I've only heard this word in English and never really knew what it was, because I've never needed to know, so that was really the point - that the Chinese word is naturally more descriptive. In general, the way this word is formed, the 肺 (lung) at the start as a noun followed by another noun, generally means that the first noun provides the context, and the second noun provides more detail, which is why I translated it as "in the lung". It's not really the correct translation as literally "swelling in the lung" would be more precisely "肺里的水肿" where 里 means "inside" and 的 is kind of like 's. A guess the more natural understanding of 肺水肿 would be "pertaining to the lung, excess of fluid". But, I don't think this kind of explicitness is unique to this, for instance "pneumonia" is 肺炎, which is the same 肺 (fei4) lung and 炎 (yan2) which means inflammation or flame as a noun or hot as an adjective. As an aside, while I've seen both meanings of the word before, I've only just realised that it's kind of odd that inflammation (which I associate more as swelling and not heat) and flame is actually common to both meanings in English as well. Looking up other words with 炎, gives me 肾炎 which is 肾 (shen4) meaning kidney and 炎 (yan2) meaning inflammation. Again, I've never once heard "nephritis" in English, and would have no idea how to guess at its meaning, but it's kind of obvious from the Chinese meaning. Similarly "gastritis" (at least I know this one!) is 胃炎 where 胃 (wei4) means stomach and "dermatitis" is 皮炎 where 皮 (pi2) is skin. There's a bunch more similar ones, but I think the pattern is obvious. I'm sure Chinese probably does have some random and non-obvious medical words that I haven't come across, but most of the ones I have learned aren't necessarily obvious until you know them, but are easy to remember afterwards, e.g. "having a fever" is 发烧 where 发 (fa1) means to send out and 烧 (shao1) means to burn. Oh, and yeah 5000 words is a lot of extra vocabulary! I'm still only around 4000 words in Chinese and I can survive most conversations and usually explain what word I mean even if I don't know what the word is!