Health and medicine

The list for the vocabulary of a hospital. The last entry is le poumon, and it shows something about English rather than about French. English has a Germanic noun, « lung », and then every adjective and compound the clinic uses is Latin or Greek: « pulmonary », « pneumonia », « pulmonologist », « pulmonary embolism ». The two halves of the vocabulary do not meet, so a reader who knows the adjective cannot get to the noun or the other way round. French runs both on one root — le poumon and pulmonaire, la pneumonie — and the whole family is visible at once. That is the general shape of English medical vocabulary: « heart » beside « cardiac », « kidney » beside « renal », « liver » beside « hepatic ». So the profit here runs one way: an English reader already owns le poumon through « pulmonary », and has never been able to use it.