Patologie e medicamenti nello Zürcher Arzneibuch

Abstract

The present article focuses on two lexical sections of the so-called Zurcher Arzneibuch (12th-13th c.), i.e. the vocabulary relating to pathology and pharmacy. Each lexeme is analysed under different points of view: attestation in the history of German; possible attestation in other Germanic and Indo-European languages; morphological and syntactic structure; meaning etc. The analysis shows that the medical-pharmaceutical vocabulary is created or identified using different cross-strategies (word formation, loanwords, loan translations; sense extension and delimitation on the basis of the conceptual fields involved and/or the syntagmatic relations between lexemes). A part of the corpus is formed by hapax legomena; some words have either died out or become archaic in Modern German, others have undergone sense extensions or restrictions. As a matter of fact, only a few terms still maintain the same meaning as in the Arzneibuch.