Chemical vocabulary in Middle English medical manuscripts
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 refer...
| Autores: | , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2021 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Alcalá (UAH) |
| Repositorio: | e_Buah Biblioteca Digital Universidad de Alcalá |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ebuah.uah.es:10017/58517 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10017/58517 https://dx.doi.org/10.20420/rlfe.2021.386 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Inglés medio Manuscritos médicos Términos simples Compuestos nominales Middle English Medical manuscripts Chemical Simplex terms Noun combinations Filología Philology |
| Sumario: | 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). |
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