The word is medical Latin-Greek, which is actually neither of those.

(In many languages it is deoxyribonucleic acid with first part not translated.)

Is etymology so relevant? The lexicon of the word is scientific jargon; its language is English.

In spanish it is Ácido DesoxirriboNucleico. It's very easy to construct, given that "ácido", "des" and "nucleico" have latin roots.

Both Spanish and English have a fair bit of influence from Latin and from languages that were influenced by Latin. A better example would be what the word is in Swahili, or Mandarin.

> Both Spanish and English have a fair bit of influence from Latin and from languages that were influenced by Latin.

I think you're missing the point. OP claimed that English is the language of science in most other languages. The parent showed, using an example from Spanish, that the actual language of science in most languages is Latin.

It is neither here nor there whether or not the language is latin-derived. And regardless, it's not possible to distinguish whether or not it is 'English' or 'Latin' from examples from non-latin-derived languages because English-speaking scientific establishments, up until the 1800s (and even to this day in some fields like botany, etc.) uses Latin nomenclature in scientific work. Most of the examples that you can find, the examples in the foreign language, English, and Latin are all going to match (I believe the exception is Medical German -- practitioners in Germany have to learn both the German and Latin versions) and it is difficult to prove without specific work into the foreign etymology, that in that case the foreign language is following Latin and not English!

In case I haven't made myself clear, it's trivial to take your Swahili question to demonstrate the point. According to Google Translate (I couldn't find a Wiktionary entry for it) in Swahili it is "asidi deoxyribonucleic". Now, is this because it follows the English form or the Latin form? You can't know without doing some digging into the Swahili Etymology.

Ah, I see your point. I suspect that Swahili's "asidi deoxyribonucleic" is probably an English loan-word, but you're right that I don't know, since I haven't done any real research.

Although Mandarin isn't "influenced" by Latin, it is also influenced by English. In China most everyday writing would just insert the letters "DNA" into the text.

But even for scientific writing, my dictionary translates DNA as 脱氧核糖核酸, where 脱 means peel off, 氧 means oxygen, and 核糖核酸 means RNA, so DNA = de-oxy-RNA. As for RNA, 核糖 means ribose and 核酸 means nucleic acid. And in 核酸, 核 means nucleus/core/pip and 酸 means sour/acid, so again the meaning of the characters joined together are simply the sum of their parts. That's always been the case in my limited experience with medical words in Mandarin.

How do you "borrow" spoken words into sign language? You can't, really -- which is why he has to invent hand gestures.

I suppose the equivalent is (what I now know is called) finger spelling: an unnatural 'sounding' word that breaks the flow, but it's [spelling is] taken from a language where it already exists.

See how well spelling out words rather than pronouncing them works for you in conversation. This really is a unique problem to adopting spoken words into a non-vocal language.

Deaf myself: usually we start with fingerspelling. If we discover it being cumbersome we invent something. Borrowing is different but not impossible.

Not to mention the new signs can involve the hand shapes from, say, the first letter of the borrowed English word. Say the word starts with a D, and everybody recognises the fingerspelt word just from the D alone (in context), then the new sign might use the hand shape for D but give it a specific action.

Deaf myself: Often you can incorporate a fingerspelled letter into a sign, so some borrowing still happens. Where I live mouth pictures are important, so often you sign the general concept and mouth a part of the complicated word.