Talk:nephrology

Greetings to the entire Wiki community,

I thought it would be relevant & of note to mention the fact that, in Arabic, the word for: a FOUNTAIN is: Nafurah (نفاية) where,there clearly is a similarity/connection to the word: NEPHROLOGY ("NEFROLOGY") through the root: n-f-r! And, it is INEVITABLE to associate a fountain (a Muslim invention? If anything, CERTAINLY, an Arab invention?) with water in the same manner that the concept of a kidney is/can be associated with regulating body fluids (hence, fluid-water connection). So, which word preceded which (or, which word is more ancient): the Greek or the Arabic-as a source for this term (it is NOT always a matter of time chronology because, as mentioned, it may be a civilization inventing a device which gave rise to the concept/term.. :)

AK63 (talk) 09:03, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Well, Ancient Greek νεφρός (nephrós) was in use already at least a thousand years before Mohammad was born. Based on related forms in Latin and the Germanic languages, it probably goes back to Proto-Indo-European, which was thousands of years still farther back. Whatever the ancestors of the ancestors of the Arabs were speaking back then, I doubt the speakers of Proto-Indo-European would have borrowed a word for a device that wouldn't be invented for thousands of years from a people they probably had never heard of to describe a body part that they may or may not have known the function of.

I think it's pretty clear that the superficial resemblance between the two words is a complete coincidence resulting from fairly recent changes in Ancient and Modern Greek- and no doubt in Arabic as well. I should also mention that the Arabic inventors merely expanded on a technology that they learned about from Greek and Persian sources. Chuck Entz (talk) 11:14, 21 March 2021 (UTC)