Therapeutic Plant Names: Neologising, Borrowing and Compounding in a Late Middle English Medical Corpus. In 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, University of Edinburgh, 2018. (original) (raw)

Chemical vocabulary in Middle English medical manuscripts

Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos (RLFE), 2021

Hunt (1990: 19) has claimed that "mineral and chemical elements are unusual" in medical recipes. Although the number of elements cannot be compared to the estimated 1,800 plant names attested in Middle English (Sauer 2011: 57), our research reveals that Middle English medical manuscripts include references to a good number of chemical items including substances such as metals and their corresponding compounds, plant extracts, and natural and man-made medical ingredients. A comprehensive linguistic analysis of the entire material containing these substances in medieval medical manuscripts has yet to be carried out. In order to study the lexis of chemical ingredients, a corpus of about 215,000 words has been specially compiled from different British libraries. The aim is to undertake a linguistic analysis of the nominal lexicon of this field in Middle English based on the data retrieved from representative authentic sources, several of which have not been published to date. We examine the provenance of the nouns according to their etymology to check whether they are borrowings or native words in the case of simplex terms. We also analyse the structure and the constituents present in nominal combinations according to the usual taxonomies based on Bauer (1983 and 2017), Kastovsky (1992) and Marchand (1969), together with specialised classifications on the topic (Norri 1991).

THE PROBLEM OF PLANT NAMES' LATIN SCIENTIFIC EQUIVALENTS IN OLD ANATOLIAN TURKISH MEDICAL MANUSCRIPT STUDIES ESKİ ANADOLU TÜRKÇESİ TIP METNİ ARAŞTIRMALARINDA BİTKİ ADLARININ LATİNCE BİLİMSEL KARŞILIKLARI SORUNU

Selçuk Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2021

Vocabulary studies are of significant importance for linguistic and cultural research because the worldview of a society is hidden in the verbal repertoire of its language. In studies on medical texts of the Old Anatolian Turkish period, it has been determined that there are errors and inconsistencies in the Latin equivalents of the plant names. The aim of this article is to reveal the true Latin equivalents of the plant names whose Latin equivalents are given incorrectly. To achieve this aim, we determined the sample selected by evaluating the forms in the indexes and dictionaries of fourteen Old Anatolian Turkish medical manuscript studies. Through this sample, we have attempted both to examine the reasons for the related discrepancies, as well as put forth solutions on how to eliminate them were evaluated. Such inconsistencies not only mislead scholars but also present them numerous challenges when it comes to further research. One of the aims of the study is to draw attention to such difficulties and discuss the measures that can be taken on the relevant issue.

A Database of Medieval Plantnames

This paper is about a database, built in Graz, Austria, of plant names from mediëval manuscripts concerning food and health. It is meant for researchers from as many as possible disciplines in the humanities as well as pharmaceuts and medicins. The paper also contains explanation of the basic classical system of the humours and temparaments.

The Sources for Plant Names in Anglo-Saxon England and the Laud Herbal Glossary

Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, 2008

Anglo-Saxon England inherited a large body of medicinal plant lore from classical antiquity. Although Latin medical texts provided much useful information to the Anglo-Saxons, they also presented numerous problems not encountered by their original audiences. Two of the greatest problems were identification of the Greek and Latin plant names and access to non-native plant species. Even if foreign plants could be acquired and in some cases cultivated in English herbal gardens, there remained the problem of interpreting which plant species was referred to in the various herbal descriptions or recipes.3 This problem had clearly existed for the original audiences of these texts too, as both Pliny and Dioscorides, for example, give numerous alternative names for the plants they discuss, and after the passage of time, such variants only multiplied. For a speaker of a Germanic language like Old English, with his or her own set of names for plants from an entirely different geographical region, the difficulty of identifying the plants named in the sources would have been far greater. Bilingual glossaries of plant names were one aid in dealing with this linguistic difficulty.

The relation of the head and the modifier in nominal compound names of medicinal herbs

164 The relation of the head a nd the modifier in nominal compound names of medicinal herbs Milada Walková, Technical University of Košice The paper presents research into nominal compound names of medicinal herbs in four languages - Dutch, English, French and Slovak. Only endocentric compounds are considered. From the morphological point of view, the head noun in these compounds is typically modified by a relational adjective, noun or noun phrase, genitive construction, or prepositional phrase. From the semantic point of view, the modifiers in herb names typically refer to various perceptual properties or environmental conditions, meaning that herbs are construed as natural kinds. However, the modifier can also refer to the purpose or effect of herbs; some other inherent properties or other plants and creatures.

Dioscorides’ De materia medica and Late Old English Herbal Glossaries

From Earth to Art: The Many Aspects of the Plant World in Anglo-Saxon England, 2003

Much of our knowledge of Old English plant-names is derived from two types of sources: the extant corpus of Old English medical writings and the numerous Latin-Old English glossaries that survive from Anglo-Saxon England. The Old English medical writings, such as the Herbarium. Bald's Leechbook, and others, have been fairly well researched in terms of their sources and the herbal lexicon they preserve (e.g., Cameron 1982, 1983; De Vriend 1984; D'Aronco 1988; Adams & Deegan 1992), but the sources of the plant-name glossaries have rarely been examined, if at all. Unfortunately, without an understanding of the sources used to compile a glossary and its subsequent development, it is quite difficult to set value on the evidence the glossary provides for the meanings of certain words, for glossaries are prone to errors of copying far more than literary texts. In this paper, I would like to examine several of these Old English plant-name glossaries in order to determine the source or sources used to compile them. There arc four glossaries in particular that 1 will consider: the Cleopatra Glossary, the Brussels Glossary, the Durham Glossary and the Laud Herbal Glossary. In spite of some major differences among these glossaries, they all descend from a common archetype. After examining a small selection of entries, I will present some preliminary observations on the textual sources, the original archetype glossary, and its production and later development.