Term formation in the Hippocratic Corpus: Osteology and angiology

Abstract

The article is dedicated to observations regarding term formations in The Hippocratic Corpus treatise “Nature on Bones”. The research material is analysed in its original text in Ancient Greek. The article encompasses an introduction, empirical part, and a conclusion. The introduction informs on the readers of The Hippocratic Corpus, its origin, possible time of writing of the treatise, authorship, content, and the present-day research of this source. The empirical part elaborates on the classification of term formation and analysis of terms, elucidating the transfer of common language words to a specific medical field, parts of speech used in terms and the structures underlying parts of speech, as well as methods of word formation. There are terms, multi-word terms and compound-word terms observed in the treatise. In the article, terms are analysed in the following groups: 1) nouns, 2) nouns with non-agreement attributes, 3) nouns with agreement attributes, 4) nouns with adverbs, and 5) compounds. The first group includes words of common language which have been under influence of the process of terminologization. This group is the largest regarding the number of terms and use, but these terms are employed only for reference to basic anatomy. The second, third, and forth groups cover multi-word terms. These three groups are not as large as the first one, but the terms here are highly specialized, allowing the naming of concepts in angiology. The last group is compound-word terms. It is the smallest group but similarly to the multi-word terms these are more specialized and can also be attributed to a conceptualized terminology.