Lingua Academica

In the wake of the the “material turn” in the humanities, this volume takes a historical perspective to shed light on the linguistic and communicative aspects of academic objects. Case studies from a range of disciplines (the history of science and medicine, literary studies, linguistics) reveal new research prospects in this previously overlooked subject area.

This book investigates the role of the Latin language as a vehicle for science and learning from several angles. First, the question what was understood as ‘science’ through time and how it is named in different languages, especially the Classical ones, is approached. Criteria for what did pass as scientific are found that point to ‘science’ as a kind of Greek Denkstil based on pattern-finding and their unbiased checking. In a second part, a brief diachronic panorama introduces schools of thought and authors who wrote in Latin from antiquity to the present. Latin’s heydays in this function are clearly the time between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. Some niches where it was used longer are examined and reasons sought why Latin finally lost this lead-role. A third part seeks to define the peculiar characteristics of scientific Latin using corpus linguistic approaches. As a result, several types of scientific writing can be identified. The question of how to transfer science from one linguistic medium to another is never far: Latin inherited this role from Greek and is in turn the ancestor of science done in the modern vernaculars. At the end of the study, the importance of Latin science for modern science in English becomes evident.

Large numbers of humanist names – Latinized or Grecized surnames – have been preserved in various linguistic areas. This study is the first to present their development using corpus-based examinations. It analyzes their different origins and geographical distribution, and contains an extensive register of names, shedding new light on surviving humanist names.

The history of German scientific language from the 16^th century to the present day is the primary research focus of the linguist and medievalist Uwe Pörksen. Twenty chapters covering forty years of her work nuance this theme, which extends beyond disciplinary boundaries. Published for the first time, Pörksen’s 1974 habilitation thesis Knowledge and Language in Goethe’s Writings on Natural Science is the center of her thought and research.

The volume examines the relationship between scientific self-understanding and scientific language usage in the German-speaking world around 1800. It discusses the re-founding of the university, the fraught relationship with rhetorical tradition, the presentational impact of scientific speech, and the political implications for audiences of this discourse.

The book examines systematic attempts to explain scientific language. It seeks to reconcile the explanatory power of newer methods to study science and the language of science with historical-empirical language usage. Building on this discussion, the study proposes adding recent cultural theory (including speech practice theory) as a supplementary explanatory element to explain scientific text production.

Medical reports were a major element of medical communication as early as the 17^th and 18^th centuries. What characterizes such texts? Using a broad-based analytic model from the field of text linguistics, the author investigates specific classes of texts – consultations, court reports, and autopsy reports – in terms of their cultural and scientific history while also identifying their particular linguistic hallmarks.

The history of German as a scientific language has grown into a fruitful field of research in recent years, occupying an interface between the approaches of literary and humanistic scholarship, the history of science and the university, and not least, language history. For the first time, this volume brings together these diverse approaches and lays the foundation for future joint research pathways.