3. Not to mention, ophthalmology is literally "study of the eye" and pediatrics is literally "child doctors". Those are made of very common greek and latin words that are in common usage today among many medical terms, so it's not like people don't learn and know them. I'll grant GP cirrhosis though, that's "weirdly off-coloured", which can be any number of conditions. Those words are sometimes locally translated as well, but almost everyone will understand the common latin/greek terms.
5. I really would be interested in seeing how comprehensible Chinese texts older than 100 years are to a modern reader. While the characters may have remained the same, pronunciation and grammar have surely changed in that time. Even if you can read it, the meaning might not be apparent e.g. Shakespeare's
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe. And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale.
relies on "hour" and "whore" sounding the same, which is lost on modern readers.
Re:The Chinese Typewriter: A History
by DonaldFisk on Thursday August 09, 2018 @09:38AM
(#17724041)
Cirrhosis, ophthalmology, and paediatrics are all derived from Classical Greek. English, Russian, Portuguese, and Turkish all have the option of borrowing technical vocabulary from Greek (or other languages), but because of its syllabic structure, borrowing into Chinese is more problematic as it's difficult or impossible to render foreign words phonetically.
5. Modern Standard Chinese is about 100 years old and even the script has changed. Before that, with a few notable exceptions, Classical Chinese was used and that's quite different to the modern written language. You would have to learn it to be able to read it, just as you have to learn Classical Greek or Latin, neither of which is a close relative of English, to be able to read them.