An XML-based Information System for Old Occitan Medical Terminology

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Gerrit Bos; Professor Dr. Guido Mensching
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2011 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 201478696

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

The importance of southern France as a center of medicine in the High and Late Middle Ages is not only due to the medical schools of Toulouse and Montpellier, but also to Jewish doctors and scientists. In addition to the scholarly languages Latin and Hebrew, the Romance language of southern France, Occitan, was also used in medical texts, starting at a very early stage. The aim of the project was to create a digital lexicographical database (DiTMAO: Dictionnaire des termes médico-botaniques de l'ancien Occitan), which would make the Old Occitan medical vocabulary accessible for the first time. As a particular innovation, the text corpus the DiTMAO is based on contains not only Old Occitan medical texts in Latin script but also extensive textual material from Jewish medicine, in which the Old Occitan vocabulary appears written in Hebrew script. The DiTMAO is thus the first dictionary to completely record the medieval medical terminology of southern France and, in addition, is indispensable for the study of medieval Hebrew medical texts, which contain a large proportion of Old Occitan loan words and glosses. With the help of DFG funding and in cooperation with the Istituto di Linguistica Computazinonale "Antonio Zampolli" (ILC, CNR Pisa), we developed a database system with a complex lexicographical editor (LexO), which meets the requirements of the lexical material at issue (such as different languages and alphabets). We were able to extract appr. 5200 variants from the corpus (appr. 2000 of which are in Hebrew script), which we mapped to appr. 2100 lemmata and fed into the LexO system. Each of the cross-linked entries contains, among others, a precise definition of the meaning of the lemma at issue, synonyms and the equivalents in other languages that are found in the “word equations" provided in the texts (mainly Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin, with a total of appr. 1500 terms for the whole DiTMAO). We also largely completed an additional onomasiological component, which opens up the Old Occitan medical terminology in a "knowledge system" (similar to a semantic network). Following the funding, the project was continued using the applicants’ own funds and those of the cooperation partner Maria Sofia Corradini, adding more material (now: 5798 variants mapped to 2219 lemmata, 1725 correspondences in other languages). Among others, we started adding Old Occitan lexical material from another DFG-funded project ("A 15th-century medico-botanical synonym list in Hebrew characters from central Italy"). We plan to gradually bring the DiTMAO online starting in the course of 2024.

Publications

• La terminología médico-botánica del occitano antiguo en grafía hebrea. Poster presented at the XXVIIe Congrès International de la Linguistique et Philologie Romanes, Nancy
  Roth, V.; Weingart, A. & Zwink, J.
  
• Nuovi aspetti relativi al «Dictionnaire de Termes Médico-botaniques de l’Ancien Occitan» (DiTMAO): creazione di una base di dati integrata con organizzazione onomasiologica. Actas del XXVI Congreso Internacional de Lingüística y Filología Románica (2013, 3, 14), 113-124. DE GRUYTER.
  Corradini, Maria Sofia & Mensching, Guido
  
• Lessico e tassonomia nell'organizzazione del ‘Dictionnaire de Termes Médico-botaniques de l'Ancien Occitan’. Revue de Linguistique Romane 78, 87–132
  Corradini, M.S.
  
• A lexicon for Old Occitan medico-botanical terminology in lemon. In: Draelants, I. et al. (eds), Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantic Web for Scientific Heritage, 25–36
  Weingart, A. & Giovannetti, E.
  
• Extending the Lemon Model for a Dictionary of Old Occitan Medico-Botanical Terminology. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (2016), 408-421. Springer International Publishing.
  Weingart, Anja & Giovannetti, Emiliano
  
• La realizzazione del 'Dictionnaire de Termes Médico-botaniques de L’Ancien Occitan' (DiTMAO): problemi di organizzazione della conoscenza medico-farmaceutica attestata nei manoscritti in occitano antico. In: Trotter, D./Bozzi, A./Fairon, C. (eds), Actes électroniques du XXVIIe Congrès international de linguistique et de philologie romanes (Nancy, 15-20 juillet 2013). Section 16: Projets en cours; ressources et outils nouveaux. Nancy: ATILF, 95–108
  Corradini, M.S.
  
• Términos médico-botánicos del occitano antiguo en grafía hebrea para el DiTMAO: casos problemáticos, in: Trotter, D./Bozzi, A./Fairon, C. (eds), Actes électroniques du XXVIIe Congrès international de linguistique et de philologie romanes (Nancy, 15-20 juillet 2013). Section 16: Projets en cours; ressources et outils nouveaux. Nancy: ATILF, 277–290
  Roth, V.; Weingart, A. & Zwink, J.
  
• Un’ontologia per il DiTMAO (Dictionnaire des Termes Médico-botaniques de l’Ancien Occitan). In: Trotter, D./Bozzi, A./Fairon, C. (eds), Actes électroniques du XXVIIe Congrès international de linguistique et de philologie romanes (Nancy, 15–20 juillet 2013). Section 16: Projets en cours; ressources et outils nouveaux. Nancy: ATILF, 55–63
  Bozzi, A. & Luzzi, D.
  
• Developing LexO: A collaborative editor of multilingual lexica and termino-ontological re-sources in the humanities. In: Frontini, F. et al. (eds), Proceedings of the workshop Language, Ontology, Terminology and Knowledge Structures (LOTKS 2017), Stroudsburg PA: Association for Computational Linguistics
  Bellandi, A.; Giovannetti, E.; Piccini, S. & Weingart, A.
  
• Le DiTMAO (Dictionnaire des Termes Médico-botaniques de l'Ancien Occitan): caractéristiques et organisation des données lexicales, in: Carrera, A./Grifoll, I. (eds): Occitánia en Catalonha: de tempses novèls, de novèlas perspectivas. Actes de l'XIen Congrès de l'Associacion Internacionala de'Estudis Occitans. Barcelona/Lhéida: Generalitat de Catalonha/Institut d'Estudis Ilerdencs, 125–138
  Corradini, M.S. & Mensching, G.
  
• Multilingual and Multiword Phenomena in a lemon Old Occitan Medico-Botanical Lexicon. Information, 9(3), 52.
  Bellandi, Andrea; Giovannetti, Emiliano & Weingart, Anja
  
• Dictionnaire des termes médico-botaniques de l’ancien occitan. In cooperation with the Institute for Computational Linguistics “A. Zampolli”, CNR, Pisa. Digital resource. Göttingen: GWDG
  Bos, G.; Corradini, M.S. & Mensching, G.
  
• Introduzione, in: Corradini, M.S./Ferrari, G. (eds), Andrea Bozzi. Percorsi di linguistica e di filologia computazionali. Pisa: ETS, 5–13
  Corradini, M. S.
  
• Le DiTMAO (Dictionnaire des termes médico-botaniques de l’ancien occitan) – innovations et évolution récente, in: J.-F. Courouau/J. François (eds), Fidelitats e dissidéncias. Actes du XIIe congrès de l’Association internationale d’études occitanes, Albi (10–15 juillet 2017). Toulouse: Section française de l’Association internationale d’études occitanes, vol. 2, 907–920
  Corradini, M.S.; Mensching, G. & Zwink, J.
  
• LexO for the DiTMAO Project, software package. Pisa: CNR, Istituto de linguistica computazioale “Antonio Zampolli”
  CNR, Istituto de linguistica computazioale “Antonio Zampolli”
  
• PTTB e DiTMAO: modularità di alcune applicazioni per le Digital Humanities
  Bozzi, Andrea
  
• LexO: an open-source system for managing OntoLex-Lemon resources. Language Resources and Evaluation, 55(4), 1093-1126.
  Bellandi, Andrea
  
• New Old Occitan lexical acquisitions: the contribution of the DiTMAO to the vocabulary of anatomy and disease. From Formal Linguistic Theory to the Art of Historical Editions (2023, 3, 4), 247-262. V&R unipress.
  Corradini, Maria Sofia