Omeopatia: un approccio “culturomico” (post written for the Special Homeopathy of Query and online Science Today ) January 14 Jean-Baptiste Michel, Aiden Erez Lieberman and several other authors, related to the Cultural
Harvard University Observatory, at the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica
, all'
American Heritage Dictionary or the Google search engine, published on Science
an interesting work entitled
Quantitative Analysis of Cultures Using Millions of Digitized Books . As you know, Google has now scanned over fifteen million volumes (about il 12% di tutti quelli pubblicati). Gli autori dell’articolo hanno selezionato, basandosi sulla qualità delle scansioni e dei dati bibliografici forniti, oltre cinque milioni di libri pubblicati fra il XVI e il XXI secolo, formando un corpus di cinquecento miliardi di parole (fra queste, 300 miliardi in inglese, 45 in francese, 37 in tedesco). Hanno poi definito insiemi composti da una a cinque parole, chiamati
N-gram . Dividendo il numero di occorrenze di un determinato
N-gram per il numero di parole nel corpus per quel determinato anno si ottiene così la frequenza d’uso di quella parola nell’anno oggetto d’interesse, ed è così possibile individuare i picchi to use a certain word (or group of words) in a time series study and so the linguistic and cultural changes. The authors called their approach "culturomica (
culturomics ). How to write in their article: The
culturomica is the application of collection and analysis of high-performance data to the study of human culture. The books are the beginning, but we need to incorporate newspapers, manuscripts, maps, artwork, and a host of other human creations. Of course, many voices - have already lost some time - will be forever unattainable.
culturomica results are a new type of evidence in science human. As with the fossils of ancient creatures, the challenge of culturomica lies in the interpretation of [that] evidence.
on a specific site
, the authors have released a browser for viewing data (called Google
Ngram Viewer ) and raw data used for new calculations by other researchers.
Historians
Mike Dash and Egil Asprem have already tried to apply the
Google Ngram Viewer in terms relative to their respective fields of research (related to us): the problem fortiani el'esoterismo.
This special is the opportunity to follow their example and have a browse at the frequency of use of "homeopathy" between 1815 and 2000
in three different
corpus: the German, French and English, as viewed through the viewer:
Search for Homöopathie, books published in German between 1815 and 2000
Search homéopathie, Homéopathie, books published in French between 1815 and 2000 -
Search homeopathy, Homeopathy, books published in English between 1815 and 2000
The instrument has its limitations (some of which have been highlighted, among others, Brett Holman
and, yet, by Egil
Asprem ) and the curators of the project are listed (in sections V and VI
FAQ ) some things to keep in mind when interpreting the data. We can, however, with a pinch, try to make a few observations: Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) was born and practiced primarily in Saxony, it is not surprising then that the word has spread first in German rather than in French (in France the practice was introduced in 1830 by the homeopathic physician Sebastiano Caserta Guidi (1769-1863) and the Hahnemann moved there in 1835, the peak
Homéopathie between 1824 and 1830 is probably an artifact) or English (it was introduced in the United States in 1825 and the United Kingdom a few years later ). More interesting is the comparison of frequencies between different languages \u200b\u200bover time: for example, if German and French is a (possible) increase in interest in the second half of the 30s of the twentieth century, English is quite recognizable a decline, then all three graphs show an explosion in the popularity of the term in the three last decades of the twentieth century, even in times and different ways.
Also interesting is the following graph that compares the frequencies of words, homeopathy and acupuncture:
Search homeopathy, acupuncture , books published in English between 1815 and 2000
How do you remember the project site, the Google Ngram Viewer is still only a tool for viewing and there is no need to make hasty assumptions about the nature of trends that we published, we hope, however, to inspire some scholars a compiere ricerche che, integrando i dati grezzi resi disponibili da Cultoromics con le metodologie e le fonti proprie dei cultural e science studies , possano fornirci importanti informazioni sul come l’omeopatia si sia diffusa nelle differenti aree culturali e sulle ragioni del suo successo, o insuccesso, culturale in funzione del tempo.
E in italiano?
Purtroppo il numero di libri digitalizzati da Google per la nostra lingua è ancora troppo ridotto e quindi non è disponibile un corpus. L’
accordo fra il Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e Google dello scorso marzo fa sperare che questo limite sarà presto exceeded, at least for the period not longer covered by copyright.
However, we can already use the power of Google Books
to study, for example, the formation of the vocabulary used by the governing alternative. We know that homeopathy has become widespread in Italy since 1821 by the Kingdom of Sicily, although occasional articles which referred to the research of Hahnemann (Anemanno or, as sometimes the name was made in Italian), had already appeared on some regular language Italian in previous years. But when it appeared the words that define it? The traditional lexicographical repertoires have the limitation of being often the result of manual profiling and coverage lexicons details is not always optimal. The first recorded claims of a word can be a number of years, decades and sometimes centuries after the actual entry into the language.
For us, the unsurpassed DELI - etymological dictionary of the Italian language (Cortellazzo - Zolli, 1999) back to 1828 for
- homeopathy and allopathy (in dictionary technical etymological and philological Abbot Marco Aurelio Marks, published in two volumes in Milan that year, but when a word is recorded from a dictionary, it is usually already in a somewhat diffuse);
- il 1834 per omiopatista ('seguace dell'omeopatia', omeopatista nel 1891);
- avanti il 1835 per l'aggettivo omiopatico (il 1859 -o forse il 1855, la voce non è chiara- per omeopatico , la forma oggi sopravvissuta; ma nel 2005 Fiorenzo Toso (Toso, 2005: 454) ha potuto retrodatarla al 1840);
- avanti il 1862 per l’identico sostantivo ('chi cura gli ammalati col metodo dell'omeopatia'; con lo stesso senso omeopatico , 1874-75);
- il 1872 (in Vittorio Alfieri) per l'aggettivo allopatico .
Da parte sua, lo Zingarelli (Zingarelli, 2010), che sfrutta un proprio corpus lessicale, anticipa omeopatia al 1826, allopatico al 1840 e aggiunge omeopata (1978). Un controllo sul recentissimo vocabolario etimologico di Alberto Nocentini (Nocentini, 2010) non porta a datazioni diverse rispetto a quelle già indicate.
Ora, pur tenendo conto del fatto che, come abbiamo già ricordato, la base dati è ancora limitata e non esente da errori, attraverso una rapida ricerca con Google Libri possiamo comunque proporre qualche modifica al quadro che appare negli strumenti lessicografici che abbiamo esaminato.
In the '20s, "omopatia" [1] appeared in a letter from Germany dated "Dresden, 25 August 1820" and published in the October 1820 issue of
Italian Library, in 1822 there emerged two forms not very successful, "omoiopatia" and "omoiopatico" (adjective in the feminine) and one that is still used, the word "allopathic," the first monograph devoted to the system of Hahnemann of the Italian peninsula,
Il sistema medico del dottor Samuele Hahnemann pubblicato a Napoli nel 1822 dal medico danese Joergen Johan Albrecht von Schoenberg (1782-1841) riprendendo il testo della sua relazione all'Accademia delle Scienze della capitale del Regno nel novembre precedente; “omiopatia”, “omiopatista” e l’aggettivo “omiopatico” sono attestabili dal 1824, quando apparvero in una delle traduzioni dell’opera principale del medico tedesco che in quegli anni vedranno la luce nella penisola italica, l’
Organo dell'arte medica , tradotta (a partire dalla seconda edizione tedesca del 1819) e pubblicata da Giuseppe Antonio Gaimari (1779-1839) con several critical notes (which are primarily our terms), "allopathic" or "allopathic" ('supporter of the current medicine', the first in the plural) made their appearance, respectively, in 1826
and
1828 parts editorial that the doctor Francesco Romani Vasto (1785-1852), one of the pioneers of the discipline in Italy, wished to precede the two volumes of his translation of another text dell'Hahnemann, the pure doctrine of medicine
[1811] in 1827, meanwhile, had appeared "Homoeopathic" ('those who cure with homeopathy' in the plural) in the translation of an article by GG Gross published the first issue
the Italian version of '
Archives of Homoeopathic Medicine edited by Joseph Belluomini Lucca (1776-1854).
And then, in the next decade: the noun "homeopathic" (for "follower of homeopathy, '" in the plural, and perhaps in the pejorative sense, resorted in 1833 in two issues of the Journal
Piemontese ; " allopathy "(adjective) in 1834 on the Italian Library
in a critical review of a translation of a text hanhemanniano appeared in Venice in 1833;" homeopathy "" homeopathy "around 1838, in
Annali di medicina omiopatica per la Sicilia ; infine “omeopata” nel 1840 (quasi 140 anni prima di quanto registrato nello Zingarelli, ma potrebbe benissimo essere un caso isolato) in una
Breve cicalata sull’Omiopatia del medico senese Baldassarre Bufalini, pubblicata sui romani
Annali medico-chirurgici .
Si tratta di risultati preliminari e nuovi studi che collochino le origini dell’omeopatia all’interno del contesto culturale, politico, sociale e scientifico dell’Italia pre-unitaria sono necessari anche per meglio investigare le questioni relative al lessico e alla sua stabilizzazione. Ma da questa rapida carrellata. is quite obvious that this was formed rather early (certainly before they could tell us what the existing lexicographic tools). In this formation seems to have been foreign to the climate of controversy between supporters of the new practice imported from across the Alps and the proponents of physician supply: proceedings from the outset, homeopathy was able to raise and that even today raises.
[1] According to some sources (see Tiberi & Verga, 2007: 97), for the first time the term homeopathy would appear in 1801 on 'Osservatore doctor, medical journal published in Naples relation to the use of belladonna contro la scarlattina, proposta da Hahnemann in un suo lavoro di quell'anno. Purtroppo non è stato possibile localizzare una collezione della rivista per controllare il riferimento.
Bibliografia
Cortellazzo, Manlio; & Zolli, Paolo (1999). DELI : Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana [2a edizione]. Bologna: Zanichelli.
Michel, J-B.; Shen, Y. K.; Aiden, A. P.; Veres, A.; Gray, M. K.; Team, T. G. B.; Pickett, J. P.; Hoiberg, D.; Clancy, D.; Norvig, P.; Orwant, J.; Pinker, S.; Nowak, M. A.; & Aiden, E. L. (2011, January 14). Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science 331 (6014): 176-182, doi: 10.1126/science.1199644
Negro, Antonio, & Negro, Francis F. (2007). Bibliography homeopathic Italian 1822-1914. Milan: Franco Angeli
Nocentini, Alberto (2010). L 'etymological: the vocabulary of Italian. Milan: Le Monnier.
Tiberi, Anna & Verga, Emanuele (2007). Clipboard history of the origins of homeopathy in Italy. In Negro & Negro cit., 97-103.
Toso, Fiorenzo (2005). Backdating and certificates from the early nineteenth century and early-twentieth-century sources. Zeitschrift für Philologie Romanische 121 (3): 426-475, doi: 10.1515/ZRPH.2005.426
Zingarelli, Nicola (2010). Lo Zingarelli Italian dictionary [12th edition]. Bologna: Zanichelli.
