Dictionary of Old Occitan medico-botanical terminology

The corpus of DiTMAO

The textual basis of the lexicon consists of already edited medico-botanical texts in Latin and in Hebrew script and of manuscripts transcribed and edited over the course of the project. (a detailed list is available at /link/). Among the sources in Hebrew script, the most prominent text type are so-called synonym lists, which contain a large amount of Old Occitan medical and botanical terms in Hebrew characters with equivalents or explanations in other languages (also spelled in Hebrew characters), mostly in (Judaeo-)Arabic, but also in Hebrew, Latin, or other Romance languages and sometimes in Greek, Aramaic or Persian. These lists can be described as ancient multilingual dictionaries, which are of particular importance for Old Occitan lexicography for two main reasons:

1. the synonym lists of the Jewish tradition include vernacular (Old Occitan) terms already from the 13th century on, hence these lists contain very early testimonies of Old Occitan technical terms.


2. The corresponding terms in other ancient languages help to determine the meaning of otherwise opaque Old Occitan terms.

A sample entry

coming soon...

The ontological conception of Ditmao

Current trends in linguistic and lexical resources show a growing interest towards the publishing in the context of the Semantic Web. The sharing of lexica in accordance with linked data principles is, nowadays, mandatory: a resource (not only of linguistic nature) that cannot be accessed, shared and reused as a dataset is basically considered unreachable, and, thus, pretty much useless from a semantic web perspective. The lemon model has been developed as a standard for publishing lexica as RDF data. More precisely, lemon should be considered as an Ontology-Lexicon model for the Multilingual Semantic Web and its nature and purpose perfectly satisfy our needs of representing the DiTMAO lexicon and the relative ontologies. DiTMAO consists of three main domains:

1. the lexicographic domain, including the lemmatized forms (lemma, variants and corresponding terms in other ancient languages) and their linguistic and lexicographic description.


2. The conceptual domain, describing the meaning of each term by means of subontologies for the fields of botany, zoology, mineralogy, human anatomy, diseases and therapy (medication, medical instruments). We aim to complement the onomasiological description, if possible, with a modern scientific classification, for at least most of the plant names, and a medieval classification of plants and other simple drugs. The medieval classification follows the Galenic system of four basic body humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm). The humors are associated with the two primary qualities by cross-combining the pairs HOT?COLD and DRY?WET. The simple drugs are classified by these quality pairs together with a certain degree of intensity, which varies from one to four (cf. [13]). In order to ensure that the categorization is in conformity with the classification used in medieval Southern France, we will only introduce the classification provided in the texts of our corpus.


3. The documentation domain, giving the source for each form of a term and its meaning. The documentation is indispensable for a historical (diachronic) dictionary.