• teft@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Because the disease name isn’t a plural of scleros.

    Sclerosis (from the greek skleros meaning hard + osis meaning a disease) is the stiffening of tissue.

    • Lvxferre
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      3 months ago

      osis meaning a disease

      Just as additional info: this is correct for English. In Ancient Greek the suffix -ωσις/-ōsis is wider, basically “plop it on a verb to get a noun for process, action or result”; so it’s a lot like one of English -ing suffixes (the one that makes nouns from verbs). e.g.

      • the falling = πτῶσις/ptôsis
      • the seizing = ἅλωσῐς/hálōsis
    • juliebean@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      i think they know that. if you pluralized ‘sclerosis’, you’d expect to get ‘scleroses’. just like pluralizing ‘thrombosis’ gets you ‘thromboses’.

  • Lvxferre
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    3 months ago

    Because that “multiple” doesn’t refer to multiple hardening (σκλήρωσῐς/sklḗrōsis) events, but rather to hardening as something uncountable happening in multiple spots.

    It’s roughly “multiple hardening”, note how the lack of a plural doesn’t feel off in this one either.

    For reference, in languages showing adjective-noun agreement, the adjective gets the singular (e.g. Portuguese “esclerose múltipla” - the plural would be “escleroses múltiplas”).