Juhani Norri

lehtori

Vastuuoppialat ja -alueet

englantilainen filologia

erityisosaaminen / kiinnostuksen kohteet: englannin sanasto, sanakirjatutkimus, erikoisalojen kielet

vastaanotto: ma 14-15

sähköposti: sähköpostiosoitehaku
huone: Pinni B 5041
puhelin: 3551 6137

Research interests

English vocabulary, past and present (especially issues relating to word-formation and semantics); dictionaries of English and English Special Languages.

Ongoing research project

Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English, 1375–1550

The Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English, 1375–1550, is a contribution to the study of Late Middle English and Early Modern English medical writings, an area that is attracting increasing attention among scholars. Great progress has been made in cataloguing the surviving medical manuscripts and early printed books, several important medical works from this period have been published as modern editions, and an electronic corpus containing some half a million words of Late Middle English medical text came out in 2005. We do not, however, yet have any comprehensive study, let alone dictionary, of English medical vocabulary in the late medieval period.

The Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English, 1375–1550 is based on a detailed analysis of 11,397 pages from medical manuscripts and early printed books.It includes information on the spelling variants, origins, and meanings of the terms. A wealth of quotations from the texts analysed are provided. Towards the end of each entry, there are references to corresponding entries, if any, in standard historical dictionaries of English (Dictionary of Old English, Middle English Dictionary, The Oxford English Dictionary). If the origin or meaning of the term has been discussed in academic books or articles, references to the latter are also provided.

The information for the dictionary has been stored in a computerized database. New information can be easily added to the database and existing information modified, if necessary. This enables keeping the book up to date after publication. In the future, it would also be possible to produce an electronic version of the dictionary, enabling users to carry out searches useful for different kinds of lexical studies. The structure of the current dictionary database (running under PostgreSQL DBMS) is customized for this particular application, but it is possible to export the dictionary data in machine-re adable formats if so desired. At the present stage of the project, the items of information in the database are being converted into a text file which is already fairly close to the final dictionary. Although a good deal of editing remains to be done, my purpose is to complete the manuscript in the course of the year 2010. Read more

Publications Relating to the Dictionary Project

The project will be described in more detail in my article “Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English, 1375–1550”, forthcoming in the volume of articles based on the papers given at the the Fourth International Conference on Historical exicography and Lexicology, Edmonton 2008 (ed. by John Considine).

The developments in English medical vocabulary in the Late Middle Ages are also discussed in my article “Entrances and Exits in English Medical Vocabulary, 1400–1550”,in Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English ed. by Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (2004), Cambridge University Press (pp. 100–143).