Scientific Nomenclature

Iakovos Garivaldis OAM

While everyday vernacular shifts constantly around the globe, scientific nomenclature operates under strict international standards (like the IUPAC for chemistry, or the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature).

Across all major Western European languages, scientific vocabulary is uniquely uniform. This is because from the Renaissance through the 19th century, European scientists deliberately used Classical Greek and Latin as a lingua franca to create new words. If a scientist in Germany invented a tool called the “spectrograph” (σκοπεύω, skopeo [look at] + γράφω, grapho [write]), French, Spanish, and English scientists instantly adopted it.

Because of this unified lexical foundation, the percentage of Greek incursion into the purely scientific/technical vocabulary is nearly identical across all six languages, sitting at an overwhelming 60% to 65%. The remaining 30% to 35% is almost entirely Latin, with less than 5% coming from Arabic (e.g., algebra, alkali) or modern native discoveries.

Here is the comparative breakdown of Greek incursion within the specific domain of scientific and technical vocabulary.

Percentage of Greek Incursion in Scientific Vocabulary

Language	Percentage of Greek in Scientific/Technical Lexicon	Primary Historical Pathway into Science	Notes on Language Behavior in Science
English	60% – 65%	Greco-Latin & Neo-Latin compounding	English relies almost entirely on classical roots for abstract science, as it lacks a mechanism (μηχανισμό) to easily turn native Germanic words into high-level concepts.
French	60% – 65%	Direct Latinization & Renaissance coinage	French law and the Académie Française strictly protect the vernacular, but fully embrace standard Greek roots for scientific, medical, and botanical taxonomies (βοτανικές ταξονομίες).
Spanish	60% – 65%	Late Latin texts & European scientific consensus	Scientific Spanish swaps Greek suffixes to fit its phonetic rules (e.g. -λογία, -logy becomes -logía), but the root morphemes remain structurally identical.
Italian	60% – 65%	Direct inheritance via Latin & Galileo’s legacy	Italian is closest to Latin, which historically absorbed Greek wholesale. Medical and anatomical (ανατομικά) terms are heavily Greek-reliant.
Portuguese	60% – 65%	Medical Latin & academic borrowing	Like Spanish, Portuguese seamlessly adapts Greek scientific compounds into its own orthography (e.g., ψυχολογία, psicologia, ορθογραφία, ortografia) without changing the semantic root.
German	45% – 55%	Neo-Latin import vs. Native Compounding	The Outlier: While German utilizes the exact same international Greek roots for advanced medical/chemical terms (Βιολογία – Biologie, Ψυχολογία – Psychologie), it has a unique ability to invent scientific words using native Germanic roots (e.g., using Wasserstoff [water-stuff] for Hydrogen, or Erdkunde [earth-knowledge] for Geography Γεωγραφία).

Why the Romance Languages match English so closely

You might expect Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese) to have vastly different percentages than a Germanic language like English. However, in the realm of pure science, they are identical for two reasons:

1. The Latin Filter: Ancient Rome absorbed Greek philosophy, medicine, and science. The Latin that birthed the Romance languages was already saturated with Greek concepts.
   
2. Neo-Classical Coining: When 18th-century European academies of science needed to name new phenomena -φαινόμενα- (like ηλεκτρισμός-electricity, δερματολογία-dermatology, or βαρόμετρο-barometer), they did not use Old English, Old French, or Old Spanish. They explicitly went to Ancient Greek dictionaries because Greek allowed for the endless stacking of prefixes and roots to create hyper-precise definitions.

Ultimately, if you are reading a medical journal or an engineering schematic, you are essentially reading a dialect of Modern Greek and Latin wrapped in the grammatical syntax of the host country.

Returning to my original motive for analyzing Germanic language content, I picked the scientific vocabulary for the so-called street language did not concern me here. The standard dictionary of everyday speech evolves constantly and new words are added in different parts of the world whilst others are being forgotten. The scientific vocabulary is more constant, more robust, less volatile and more comprehensive when used to describe or discuss a topic. Hence I was looking at finding the percentage of incursion of Classical (and perhaps also Modern) Greek in all of the following languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian.

Conclusion – Classical Greek Reigns Supreme in Science Communication

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