Why is science language so complicated?

Question

I was just wondering why science has so many BIG @ CONFUSING roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Is there any reason behind it all? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Well, Science is a fairly complicated topic, even if you're just covering the basics.

There are a lot of Latin and Greek based words, because there are quite a bit of things that you cannot describe without creating a new word for them.

Science is it's own language.

Hope that sheds some light! :D

Answer 2

because scientists are genious!!

and we are not as smart as them :P

Answer 3

Three main reasons:

1) For centuries, Latin and Greek were the languages used by the highest educated people; they're more comfortable with such terms than the general populace, and also use them out of traditional practice.

2) Scientific language has to be more exact than casual communications, and sometimes the only way to do that is to use a more specific - and thus usually longer - term than they might otherwise.

3) Scientific communication is supposed to be universal - you want terms to mean the same thing to a scientist in Japan as they do in France.  Colloquial language often does not lend itself to sufficiently specific translation.

Answer 4

because it has to be diffrent than anything else you dont want it to have a lot of meanings

Answer 5

There's a lot of information to be stored and sorted in science, that's partly the reason for the big jargon.  The other part is scientists like to make themselves sound smarter than they really are, it's a bit like forming a nerdy click which all the other moguls rack their brains at trying to figure out. But in reality every big word is usually a very simple easily understandable concept.

Answer 6

is just really, very well described terminology that comes from latin.

Answer 7

It's complex because you need complex language to describe a complex topic. Each word is made up from Greek/Latin roots and their meanings make up it's definition

Answer 8

The purpose of language is to communicate information. If you use a simple word that has multiple meanings, people are left wondering what you mean. For example, open your dictionary to the word "saw" to see how many meanings a short word can have. In contrast, a chemical name can describe the structure of the compound and the scientific name of an organism should describe that one and no other. Those words are understood by scientists the world over.

Answer 9

Each and every discipline has its own nomenclature. It is like a subculture with its own slang. This way, the outsiders remain as such.