Question

Cientific words often come from Greek or Latin. True False

Answer 1

True. You can see the examples in basic chemistry. 'Atom' is derived from a Greek word 'Atomos'. Similarly, femur is a Latin word meaning thigh bone.
This is because in the 1700s, Latin was used in Western Europe as the common language of science, and scientific names were in Latin or Greek. Key scientific figures such as Newton and Mendeleev published their papers and findings in Latin. When Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus started to devise a system of classifying organisms, he gave different phyla and species Latin names, because Latin was such a universal scholarly language in Europe.