Abbreviations in medieval medical manuscripts

Understanding the large number of abbreviations present in any medieval manuscript is one of the essential skills required by any knowledgeable palaeographer. English medieval manuscripts contain a great variety of abbreviations which were transferred from Latin and applied to the vernacular. As a result, their reasonably standard Latin system lost consistency. Editorial practice should avoid intervention, as it may detract from the originality and the text distinct and stylistic features. However, it is crucial to expand abbreviations coherently to carry out further analysis from a historical linguistic perspective. Thus, this article aims to demonstrate how the way in which a palaeographer transcribes specific abbreviations has an impact on the establishment of the dialectal provenance of a Middle English manuscript. In order to do so, we shall analyse the abbreviations extracted from a corpus of medical manuscripts and bring to light their relevance as far as English historical dialectology is concerned

Spirituality and health in pandemic times: lessons from the ancient wisdom

The goal of this paper is to analyze how the historical episode of the so-called Plague of Athens between the years 430 and 426 BC seems to have been the first phenomenon classified as an epidemic by Hippocrates, and the historian Thucydides described its cultural, social, political and religious consequences. However, such a crisis generated the need for a new culture, and consequently a new theological mentality, as a cultural driver that made it possible to transform the Asclepiad Sanctuary of Kos into the first hospital in the West to integrate spirituality and science as ways to promote the healing of culture in order to achieve the ideal of health. The adopted method was a semantic analysis of the classic texts that help contextualize the Hippocratic view of the epidemic, spirituality, and health, and how these questions were received by Christianity at the time. The reception of this experience by Christianity, despite suffering some tension, also expands this Greek ideal and constitutes a true heritage of ancient wisdom that can be revisited in the time of the new pandemic, COVID-19. The perspective assumed here is interdisciplinary, putting in dialogue Theology and Health Sciences.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Non-Standard Vietnamese Word Detection and Normalization for Text-to-Speech

Converting written texts into their spoken forms is an essential problem in any text-to-speech (TTS) systems. However, building an effective text normalization solution for a real-world TTS system face two main challenges: (1) the semantic ambiguity of non-standard words (NSWs), e.g., numbers, dates, ranges, scores, abbreviations, and (2) transforming NSWs into pronounceable syllables, such as URL, email address, hashtag, and contact name. In this paper, we propose a new two-phase normalization approach to deal with these challenges. First, a model-based tagger is designed to detect NSWs. Then, depending on NSW types, a rule-based normalizer expands those NSWs into their final verbal forms. We conducted three empirical experiments for NSW detection using Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), BiLSTM-CNN-CRF, and BERT-BiGRU-CRF models on a manually annotated dataset including 5819 sentences extracted from Vietnamese news articles. In the second phase, we propose a forward lexicon-based maximum matching algorithm to split down the hashtag, email, URL, and contact name. The experimental results of the tagging phase show that the average F1 scores of the BiLSTM-CNN-CRF and CRF models are above 90.00%, reaching the highest F1 of 95.00% with the BERT-BiGRU-CRF model. Overall, our approach has low sentence error rates, at 8.15% with CRF and 7.11% with BiLSTM-CNN-CRF taggers, and only 6.67% with BERT-BiGRU-CRF tagger.Comment: The 14th International Conference on Knowledge and Systems Engineering (KSE 2022

From the manuscript to the screen: Implementing electronic editions of mediaeval handwritten material

This paper describes the electronic editing of the Middle English material housed in the Hunterian Collection at Glasgow University Library (GUL), a joint project undertaken by the universities of Málaga, Glasgow, Oviedo, Murcia and Jaén which pursues the compilation of an electronic corpus of mediaeval Fachprosa in the vernacular (http://hunter.filosofia.uma.es/manuscripts). The paper therefore addresses the concept of electronic editing as applied to The corpus of Late Middle English scientific prose with the following objectives: (a) to describe the editorial principles and the theoretical implications adopted; and (b) to present the digital layout and the tool implemented for data retrieval. A diplomatic approach is then proposed wherein the editorial intervention is kept to a minimum. Accordingly, features such as lineation, punctuation and emendations are every now and then accurately reproduced as by the scribe’s hand whilst abbreviations are yet expanded in italics. GUL MS Hunter 497, holding a 15th-century English version of Aemilius Macer’s De viribus herbarum, will be used as a sample demonstration (Calle-Martín – Miranda-García, forthcoming).The present research has been funded by the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (project P07-HUM–02609) and by the Spanish Ministry of Education (project FFI2008-02336)

Digital Papyrology II

The ongoing digitisation of the literary papyri (and related technical texts like the medical papyri) is leading to new thoughts on the concept and shape of the "digital critical edition" of ancient documents. First of all, there is the need of representing any textual and paratextual feature as much as possible, and of encoding them in a semantic markup that is very different from a traditional critical edition, based on the mere display of information. Moreover, several new tools allow us to reconsider not only the linguistic dimension of the ancient texts (from exploiting the potentialities of linguistic annotation to a full consideration of language variation as a key to socio-cultural analysis), but also the very concept of philological variation (replacing the mono-authorial view of an reconstructed archetype with a dynamic multitextual model closer to the fluid aspect of the textual transmission). The contributors, experts in the application of digital strategies to the papyrological research, face these issues from their own viewpoints, not without glimpses on parallel fields like Egyptology and Near Eastern studies. The result is a new, original and cross-disciplinary overview of a key issue in the digital humanities

The Fundamental Work of the Translator: The Steps for the Translation of a Specialised Medical Text about the Integumentary System

Medical journals and articles are translated into several languages so that they can be understood not only by other doctors around the world but also by non-experts. Hence, the work conducted by the translator is of vital importance, since otherwise only a small percentage of people would be able to comprehend these texts. One of the main objectives of this undergraduate dissertation is to highlight the importance and the complexity of the work of the translator in specialised medical translation. Furthermore, the difficulties of specialised medical translation have been analysed in depth, in particular those posed by an English medical text about a specific field such as ‘the integumentary system’ when translated into Spanish. The results and the solutions to these problems have been successfully obtained thanks to a documentation process and the consultation of different parallel texts in Spanish.Las revistas y artículos médicos se traducen a diversos idiomas para que puedan ser entendidos no solo por otros médicos de todo el mundo sino también por los no expertos. De ahí que el trabajo que realiza el traductor sea de vital importancia, ya que, de lo contrario, solo un pequeño porcentaje de personas sería capaz de comprender estos textos. Uno de los principales objetivos de este trabajo de fin de grado es destacar la importancia y la complejidad del trabajo del traductor en la traducción médica especializada. Así mismo, se han analizado en profundidad las dificultades de la traducción médica especializada, en particular las que plantea un texto médico en inglés sobre un campo tan específico como ‘el sistema tegumentario’ cuando se traduce a español. Los resultados y soluciones a estos problemas se han obtenido con éxito gracias a un proceso de documentación y a la consulta de diferentes textos paralelos en español.Departamento de Filología InglesaGrado en Estudios Inglese