Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 539-40):
The first of these was their resource for creating technical terms. For systematic scholarship it is necessary to technicalise some of the words that are used, and this imposes two requirements: the words must be interpretable in an abstract sense, since they need to refer not to outward appearances but to the properties and principles that lie behind them; and they need to relate to one another in a regular and systematic way, so as to form stable taxonomies.
Ancient Greek was a language of settlement, in which the potential for this kind of development lay predominantly in the nouns; and there existed already a number of noun-forming suffixes by which words of other classes — verbs and adjectives — were transcategorised. …
Using … nominalising suffixes the Greek scientists created hundreds of new technical terms; and by combining them with other derivational resources they developed extended series of semantically related forms …
In this way they established the foundations of the lexical component of a technical discourse, and the principles on which it could be indefinitely extended.