Medical terminology of the high Middle Ages
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31558/1815-3070.2026.51.10Keywords:
Middle High German, medical terminology, medical term, lexical-semantic group, core, peripheryAbstract
The article presents a structural and semantic analysis of medical terminology in the Middle High German language based on lexicographic sources, particularly the dictionaries of M. Lexer and G. F. Benecke, W. Müller, and F. Zarncke. A corpus of 439 medical lexical units was compiled and classified into four lexical-semantic groups: names of diseases and symptoms (198 units, 45.1%), names of body parts and organs (147 units, 33.5%), vocabulary related to treatment and health (85 units, 19.4%), and names of medical professions (9 units, 2%). The quantitative dominance of the first group reflects the pathocentric orientation of medieval medical terminology, in which the description of diseases served as the principal means of recording medical knowledge. A considerable proportion of the corpus is also represented by terms denoting body parts and organs, which indicates the development of anatomical concepts during the Middle High German period. The study identifies extensive word-formation paradigms centered around the stems suht-, bluot-, and arzen- / arzât-, demonstrating the systematic nature of terminology formation within the medieval medical tradition. The results of the analysis confirm that the medical vocabulary of Middle High German constitutes a structurally organized system with a distinct core-periphery organization. Prospects for further research include a diachronic analysis of the development of medical terminology, an investigation of word-formation models of medical terms, and a comparison of Middle High German medical vocabulary with modern medical terminology.
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