Timeline for Why is "dentist" preferred to "stomatologist"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 17, 2021 at 13:00 | comment | added | Mitch | If you walk into a dentist in the US and use 'stomatologist' everyone will look at you like you're crazy. | |
| Jun 17, 2021 at 13:00 | comment | added | Mitch | @Line OK then. When someone else changes a question so radically, it's not clear that it maintains what you originally expected. So it's good that you confirm that it is appropriate for you. In quite a different direction though is that your original question -and- this modified new one are both... how to say this diplomatically... linguistically naive. These are two different languages and so they treat the words differently. You just don't say 'stomatologist' in English and you just don't say 'dentist' in Russian or whatever. | |
| Jun 17, 2021 at 12:12 | comment | added | Line | @Mitch "Your edit totally changed the OP's question into another one" - good for me since in the original shape it was closed and now it has got 2 upvotes ;d I had no idea about ngrams, it's great | |
| Jun 17, 2021 at 11:54 | vote | accept | Line | ||
| Jun 16, 2021 at 18:10 | comment | added | Mitch | @fev Your edit totally changed the OP's question into another one. You took the wrong lesson from that ngram and from an internet search. 'stomatologist' is very rare to the point of being 'not a word' for most people (and certainly not recognized by most people who go to get help with their teeth. Word recognizability is not a mathematical proof. Somewhere someone may have used 'stoma...' which may make it 'a word', but nobody uses it instead of dentist. Why don't -you- use 'dentist'? Different languages, different cultural history, different words, that's all there is. | |
| Jun 16, 2021 at 16:23 | comment | added | fev | @ Andrew Leach, Kate Bunting Yes, stoma can mean something else on its own, but there is no ambiguity about stomatology being related to oral medicine and dentistry and not to something else. Accumulation: thank you for the disambiguation. I see the terms are not uniformly defined across the web. | |
| Jun 16, 2021 at 16:15 | comment | added | Acccumulation | "doctor, medical practitioner, medic" do not mean the same thing. A nurse is a medical practitioner, but isn't a doctor. "Medic" has the connotation of being a battlefield, or otherwise in-the-field, provider of medical care. | |
| Jun 16, 2021 at 16:13 | comment | added | Kate Bunting | @AndrewLeach - Indeed. The word immediately suggested the other kind of stoma to me. | |
| Jun 16, 2021 at 15:59 | comment | added | Andrew Leach♦ | @fev. Yes, in Britain they are dentists and registered with the General Dental Council (which also allows them use of the "Doctor" title!) Our dentists are not physicians, but physicians (eg General Practitioners) will often refer patients to dentists with any oral problem. In the NHS, determination of cause and preservation of teeth is more important than replacement, and yet our dentists are dentists, and not stomatologists. In fact the root stoma conjures up something quite different. | |
| Jun 16, 2021 at 15:29 | comment | added | fev | @JohnLawler: It is so interesting to see how different circumstances shape the use of a term. I searched the Ngram for the American English use of the same terms, and the differences with the British English seem to be small. | |
| Jun 16, 2021 at 15:22 | history | edited | fev | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jun 16, 2021 at 15:22 | comment | added | John Lawler | It would appear that stomatologist is the medical term, common where dental care is integrated with medical care. In he United States, there is very little integration of health care systems of any kind, and none at al for dental care.. Consequently there is no special term for doctors to use, because they call dentists dentists too. | |
| Jun 16, 2021 at 15:16 | history | answered | fev | CC BY-SA 4.0 |