Tue, 07 Sep 2010
Mind Your Dipthongs
There was a discussion on one of the skeptic websites on the alternative spelling of homeopathy as homoeopathy. As usual on such sites, the discussion was just another sharp stick to jab at homeopathy. The reason for the alternative spelling is pretty simple. When homeopathy was first developed, educated men (sorry, few educated women then) including doctors studied the classical languages, always Latin and sometimes Greek. They cored about how words were derived from their roots. And the transliteration of words from their classical roots was done so that this derivation was clear. Homoeo comes from the Greek word homoios, meaning same or similar. And the dipthong "oe" was then the standard transliteration of "oi." Now that no one studies the classics any more, this sort of precision seems overly fussy. And as the word seems strange when spelled as "homoeo," the first "o" was dropped. The same simplification of dipthongs happened in may medical terms.
It's similar to how many Sankrit words have been transliterated into English. The diacritical marks that distinguish different transliterated letters get dropped everywhere except in scholarly publications. The word meaning wisdom gets transliterated as prajna, without the macron indicating the final long "a," which makes it a feminine and not a masculine noun. (All Sanskrit words ending in long vowels are feminine.)
