It certainly makes it easier to find in a book or via search. You have one word for what it's called, instead of having some under "Born without a cerebellum," some as "Missing cerebellum," others in "No cerebellum," "Undeveloped cerebellum," etc.
Plus it's more convenient to say. Not a big deal for us, but to people who deal with crazy medical conditions all day long, describing each one in natural language would be imprecise and time consuming.
Though obviously it's not the reason it was adopted, it is kind of neat that using a dead language for scientific terms disambiguates them cleanly for the purposes of searching.
Any live language would have accidental matches (even quoted) where it's just the obvious thing to say, a la "born without a cerebellum".
not a dead language.. greek language is still alive
and indeed it sounds like "born without a cerebellum"
(but to be fair the syntax reminds of medical term)
having dead languages to imprecisely map to a word (but nobody knows that because no one really speaks the dead language) isn't any better. It also creates barriers and wasted time in learning the practice. The average individual has to deal with that folly even more when it comes to law.
It's better to have a shorter and noun form for referencing being born without a cerebellum. It's especially convenient for researchers who write about it and have to refer to being born without a cerebellum multiple times in a single paragraph.
It's better to have a shorter and noun form for referencing cerebellar agenesis. It's especially convenient for researchers who write about it and have to refer to cerebellar agenesis multiple times in a single paragraph.
Well, I'd read it as "this condition is known as failing to develop a cerebellum". Even if everyone was born without a cerebellum and you were expected to grow yours by the age of 10, not growing one would be sensibly termed "agenesis".
Also, "agenesis" is greek, like most medical terminology ;)
Does "cerebellar agenesis" sound English to you? Almost all things in medicine have almost universal names derived from Greek and/or Latin. Of course, until a few hundred years ago it was because those were the languages of science; these days the terms still fill the same purpose as they did back then - providing a common vocabulary for people from diverse origins.
Yes, "cerebellar agenesis" is an English term. Having Latin and Greek etymologies doesn't make the words Latin or Greek; "cerebellar" isn't even a legal Latin adjectival form.
Here are the titles of the wikipedia article "Cerebellum" in some other languages:
Lillehjerne (Danish)
Kleinhirn (German)
Parengephaliδa (Greek - Παρεγκεφαλίδα if you can read Greek)
Cerebelo (Spanish)
Cervelet (French)
Otak kecil (Indonesian)
Smadzenites (Latvian)
Kisagy (Hungarian)
Beyincik (Turkish)
Xiaonao (Chinese - 小脑)
Nobody's copying the English word (well, Tagalog and Malaysian are) -- they're all using their own native terms for "small brain".
Yes, the cerebellum is know as 'lillehjernen' in Danish and that word is the only word most people know for it. Nevertheless, doctors learn the word cerebellum so they can read what doctors in other countries write.
They also use the word amongst themselves. Googling for 'cerebellum ugeskrift for læger' gives plenty of hits. Likewise for 'cerebellar ugeskrift for læger'.
They might write 'agenese' instead of 'agenesis', though.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's because it's slightly faster, still makes sense if you have learned the right bits of Latin, and because it makes you feel smart.
To tease you a little bit, I read this as
> This condition is known as being born without a cerebellum.
I don't know why we need a latin name for everything!