Temporal Labels and Specifications in Monolingual English Dictionaries

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Defining Middle English and Early Modern English medical words and phrases in the headwords of Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English, 1375-1550

The paper I would present at the conference deals with the problems encountered in the defining of Middle English and Early Modern English medical words and phrases. The lexemes discussed are among the headwords in my Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English, 1375-1550, a long-term project that I expect to complete in the next two or three years. For the dictionary, I have analysed altogether 11,397 pages from manuscripts (some of them edited ones) and early printed books. The seventy-two medical treatises in the corpus include surgical manuals, academic treatises written by university-trained physicians, and remedybooks. Many of the words and phrases collected for the dictionary present considerable challenges in the drafting of the definition. The problems facing the lexicographer include at least the following: (1) The modern descendant of the medieval term (e.g. diabetes, tinea, dysentery) is in many instances more precise in meaning than was the case in the Middle Ages and over-precise definitions must be avoided. (2) Polysemy is rife in the medical writings examined, and it is not always clear under which sense a particular occurrence should be placed. For example, epiglotum is found in as many as six different senses, including 'epiglotis', 'larynx', 'Adam's apple', 'trachea', 'uvula', and, perhaps surprisingly, 'omentum'. (3) Homonymy is on the whole rare, but in the case of lent fever, the adjectival modifier is either the adjective lent 'slow' ('a slow or prolonged fever') or the noun lent 'spring' ('a fever prevalent in spring; probably the English variety of malaria'; cf. OE lencten-adl). (4) Some Latin adoptions occur only once in the dictionary corpus, and any further information about their meaning must be gleaned from Latin medical works, the ultimate origin often being Greek or Arabic.</em

Digitization of Data for a Historical Medical Dictionary

What are known as specialized or specialist dictionaries are much more than lists of words and their definitions with occasional comments on things such as synonymy and homonymy. That is to say, a particular specialist term may be associated with many other concepts, including quotations, different senses, etymological categories, semantic categories, superordinate and subordinate terms in the terminological hierarchy, spelling variants, and references to background sources discussing the exact meaning and application of the term. The various concepts, in turn, form networks of mutual links, which makes the structure of the background concepts demanding to model when designing a database structure for this type of dictionary. The Dictionary of medical vocabulary in English, 1375–1550 is a specialized historical dictionary that covers the vast medical lexicon of the centuries examined. It comprises over 12,000 terms, each of them associated with a host of background concepts. Compiling the dictionary took over 15 years. The process started with an analysis of hand-written manuscripts and early printed books from different sources and ended with the electronic dictionary described in the present paper. Over these years, the conceptual structure, database schema, and requirements for essential use cases were iteratively developed. In our paper, we introduce the conceptual structure and database schema modelled for implementing an electronic dictionary that involves different use cases such as term insertion and linking a term to related concepts. The achieved conceptual model, database structure, and use cases provide a general framework for reference-oriented specialized dictionaries, including ones with a historical orientation.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Digitization of data for a historical medical dictionary

What are known as specialized or specialist dictionaries are much more than lists of words and their definitions with occasional comments on things such as synonymy and homonymy. That is to say, a particular specialist term may be associated with many other concepts, including quotations, different senses, etymological categories, semantic categories, superordinate and subordinate terms in the terminological hierarchy, spelling variants, and references to background sources discussing the exact meaning and application of the term. The various concepts, in turn, form networks of mutual links, which makes the structure of the background concepts demanding to model when designing a database structure for this type of dictionary. The Dictionary of medical vocabulary in English, 1375–1550 is a specialized historical dictionary that covers the vast medical lexicon of the centuries examined. It comprises over 12,000 terms, each of them associated with a host of background concepts. Compiling the dictionary took over 15 years. The process started with an analysis of hand-written manuscripts and early printed books from different sources and ended with the electronic dictionary described in the present paper. Over these years, the conceptual structure, database schema, and requirements for essential use cases were iteratively developed. In our paper, we introduce the conceptual structure and database schema modelled for implementing an electronic dictionary that involves different use cases such as term insertion and linking a term to related concepts. The achieved conceptual model, database structure, and use cases provide a general framework for reference-oriented specialized dictionaries, including ones with a historical orientation.publishedVersionPeer reviewe