CONTENT

Editorial:

-Roxana Kath

Artikel:

Eva Wöckener-Gade, Wann ist ein terminus technicus ein terminus technicus? – Das Beispiel àτρεμής im Corpus Hippocraticum

In this paper, I present some results of my research done in the project eXChange. My main goal was to investigate to what extent and how the terminology of the Corpus Hippocraticum has been influenced by the language of the preceding (esp. lyric) literature. A common view in the linguistics concerned with languages for special purposes (the German ‘Fachsprachen’) holds that termini technici are often created by implementing a word from the common language into a technical context and narrowing its former meaning down to a specialized and strictly defined one. While this mechanism could be traced for several terms in the Corpus Hippocraticum, some terms could be found which denote special processes or methods and have been taken over into the medical context without a significant change of meaning. The question is raised if these terms can be regarded as termini technici even if their meaning has not been coined in a specialized context.

Michaela Rücker, Die Hüter des Hades. Zur Bedeutung und Interpretation der homerischen Kimmerier

This paper deals with the Homeric Cimmerians, who were located at the end of the world, on the doorsteps to Hades. At the beginning of the work, it was necessary to build up a concept of research 1st to find the relevant sources and 2nd to distinguish the mythical Cimmerians from the historical. Tools from the project eAQUA and eXChange illustrate the selection of sources.

Oliver Bräckel, Perser, Meder und Parther im Spiegel der Quellen

The following article is another contribution to the use of tag pies in the wide field of Digital Humanities. Wordclouds provide suitable means when summarizing and visualizing data to support the analysis of analytical tasks and examining of bigger collections of text. The specific use in the field of Classics will be illustrated by means of examining the corpus of the TLG (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) with regard to the specific question about the connection of three ancient nations: Persians, Medes and Parthians. How are these nations described by the ancient authors and where are the differences and similarities between them? Hence it should be obvious which possibilities tag pies offer to help to work on specific scholarly tasks and where the limitations of this method lie.

Friedrich Meins, Anacharsis in der Diskussion über das Kriterion der Wahrheit in Sextus Empiricus' Adversus Mathematicos: Versuch einer Erläuterung mit Hilfe verschiedener Tools zur Visualisierung von Kookkurrenzen (eAQUA/eXChange TagPies)

The paper argues that the (obviously fictional) quote attributed to the legendary Scythian sage Anacharsis in the work of the sceptic Sextus Empircus is more likely to be understood as some kind of ironical twist than as a substantial hint towards a specific philosophical background: At the time of Sextus, Anacharsis was best known as the proverbial wise man. As such, he denies the existence of a criterion of truth that is discussed in the respective passages. At the same time, the figure of the wise man itself is seen as a criterion of truth by several dogmatic philosophers Sextus is arguing against. This leads to a paradoxical situation in which the criterion denies the existence of the criterion explicitly, and, on a more structural level, even the wise man per se the existence of wise men in general.
Several tools for the visualization of significant co-occurrences such as the eAQUA co-occurrence-analysis or the eXchange TagPies are used supportively to show that in the time of Sextus the connections between the figure of Anacharsis and the concept of sagacity are indeed much stronger than those between Anacharsis and any specific philosophical school.