Hey, JWKennedy. The claim that “pneumoultra-yaddayaddayadda” is a hoax is interesting. Where’d you hear it?
MKIA:
AFAIK, the lung disease was created for a specific dictionary, and doesn’t appear anywhere in medical literature.
That’s what I’ve heard–could be another UL.
Hey, when we discuss 19th Century Church of England history, we use “antidisestablishmentarianism” all the time!! 
So, polycarp, are you saying some of the people in the 19th Century Church of England behaved Antidisestablismentarianistically? (34 letters, ha!)
Quick-N-Dirty Aviation: Trading altitude for airspeed since 1992.
i’ve got a (possible dumb) question. there are scientist that speak different languages, so all those long medical terms…how do you say them in chinese,et al? not all of them are latin based.
I only know a couple:
In Chinese
Hernia is “Won Hung Lo”
Tinnitus is “Yu Rang”
Uncontrollable libido in Hawaiian is “Kamonna Wanna Laya”
I think it’s perfectly kosher to import medical and scientific words into pretty much any language, untranslated. Sometimes the word will be pronounced slightly differently, and often transliterated. Transliteration should be pretty doable for phonetic alphabets like the Japanese kanas and Arabic. It seems like it would nearly impossible in Chinese, so I bet they just write the word in next to all their ordinary Chinese characters.
This wouldn’t apply to medical and scientific words that exist in the language before their exposure to English or Latin or wherever the new word came from. It’s easy to translate “acquired immune deficiency syndrome” into any language, so they probably do that (and give it the appropriate acronym?).
Just a WAG about how they do it in Chinese is that they describe the disease, so something like “adrenoleukodystrophy” might be translated as “genetic nerve-sheath deterioration disease.”
In Spanish, for example, “bazooka” (OK, not a medical term) translated at one time to “portable anti-tank weapon.”
In french:
syndrome d’immunodéficience acquise
or SIDA
Jacques Kilchoer
Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
I don’t recall offhand where I saw the account of “pneumoultra…” being a hoax, but it was quite circumstantial and from a reliable source (maybe even Cecil).
But I would add that as a word it’s all wrong – it’s odd bits of Latin, Greek and English jammed up together in a way that a real scientist trying to create the word wouldn’t have done.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams