ICOME6 Abstract

Marta Sylwanowicz
Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna TWP, Warsaw
Email: smart76 at poczta dot onet dot pl

And this is gode medicine in the sikenes...: names of medicines in Late Middle English medical texts

According to Schäfer (1989: 1) “Around 1500 English was incapable of providing a linguistic medium for traditional scholarship and for the rapidly developing scientific disciplines since it lacked the necessary terminologies”. This dismissive view of any pre-1500 progress in the development of scientific terminology disregards the major developments that had taken place in the preceding years. McConchie’s (1997) examination of the vocabulary in medical works published between 1547-1612 and Norri’s (1992, 1998) thorough analysis of the names of sicknesses and body parts reveal that the period 1375-1500 laid solid foundations for the formation of English scientific vocabularies, at least in the sphere of medicine (Norri 2004). These studies reveal also how translators, who are often responsible for enriching the lexicon, struggled with many problems to find adequate English words for the names of various sicknesses, medical instruments, or medicines. Although occasionally native expressions are used, copyists usually transferred Latin or French terms into English texts. As a result, readers very often encountered ubfamiliar words or expressions. The writers, however, used various techniques to facilitate the understandig of difficult terms.

The aim of this paper is to provide an examination of the names of medicines found in Late Middle English medical texts. Particular attention will be paid to (1) the origins of individual words and phrases, (2) the overall structure and development of the vocabulary and (3) the techniques used by the translators in their presentation of medical terminology.

The data for the paper come from the Oxford English Dictionary, the Middle English Dictionary available online and the Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT), a computerised collection of medical treatises from c. 1375 to c. 1500. MEMT has been produced by the research team in the Department of English at the University of Helsinki under the supervision of Prof. Irma Taavitsainen and Dr Päivi Pahta. The texts of the corpora are subdivided into three categories, i.e. Surgical texts, Specialised texts, and Remedies and materia medica. Additionaly the corpora contains 10 works in verse. The MEMT is a comprehensive tool which provides a solid basis for studies focusing on one register of writing.

This is a pilot study which attempts to contribute to the historical description of the particular lexical field.

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