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This paper presents some results from a wider study which aims to define the features of German medical textbooks from a diachronic perspective. The medical textbook is presented here as a genre-class (Textsortenklasse) subsuming all texts written for didactic purposes in the field of medicine, i.e. texts aiming to present the theoretical and practical background required in this particular specialist professional field. Since the lingua franca of academic communication was Latin until the 18th century, the corpus used for this study mainly comprises surgery textbooks. The paper focuses solely on structural aspects of textbooks, seeking to show how these aspects functionally contribute to the realization of the general textual function and thereby constitute a historically established conventionalized scheme underlying genres. However, a thorough and effective description of a genre-class requires a much more extensive approach including more interrelated levels of analysis.
Globalisierung durch reduzierte Fachwörter, oder Elemente einer beinahe universellen Lingua franca?
(2020)
This paper focuses on multi-segmental acronyms ('Kurzwörter'), whose use was initially condemned by German linguistic purists as a manifestation of language decay. However, the desire for abbreviation has not abated: multi-segmental acronyms are being used more and more. Without them, technical language would no longer be conceivable today. But are they only popular because of their brevity? This article investigates the advantages of using multi-segmental acronyms in technical texts, as well as exploring a kind of globalization process affecting technical languages, manifested in a new kind of embedding of English and English-transmitted technical terms.
German authors considered easy comprehensibility of their architecture books very important and therefore they included in them a number of explanatory terminological notes of varying complexity. These notes gradually evolved into elaborate terminological glossaries. This paper explores the terminology and its presentation, as well as the authors' motivation.
The article introduces the language of wine connoisseurs in all its forms and, based on a number of specific examples from different genres and various types of texts (specialist literature, catalogues, wine labels, etc.), aims to stimulate discussion on the circumstances which influence the level of specialization in connection with the choice of linguistic resources.
The focus on communication in research on professional and scientific language somehow reflects the intention of John L. Austin's phrase "How to do things with words?" But a description based on the concept of communication ultimately also relies on linguistic idiosyncrasies. We will look at things the other way round and ask first "how to do (professional) things" and then look at the linguistic units used specifically for this purpose. Professionalism in this view takes very different forms for different types of actions ("practices"). Although reliability and professional authority are central features of all linguistic realizations to be considered, they are represented in very different ways. As a result, professionalism not only shows in the high degree of explicitness of technical prose typical for written scientific discussion. It is also reflected in the high degree of implicitness of speech that accompanies and constitutes practical action.
With the preservation of health an age-old concern for humanity, guides to healthy living based on humoral theory were among the earliest texts of medieval school medicine to be translated from Latin into the vernacular. Subject of this study is the development of a German technical language for dietetics from the late thirteenth to the late fifteenth century as evidenced in Hiltgart von Hürnheim's translation of the 'Secretum secretorum', the anonymous translation of the regimen in the 'Breslauer Arzneibuch', and the four independent translations of Konrad von Eichstätt's 'Regimen sanitatis'. Special emphasis is put on a number of 'termini technici' from humoral theory and the way the various translators tackled these terms.