Text- und Satzstrukturen in medizinischen Fachtexten für Praktiker: Der mittelhochdeutsche ‚Bartholomäus‘

Abstract

By analyzing textual and sentence structures of the so-called ‚Bartholomäus‘, a medical compilation for practitioners, this paper demonstrates how an internal expert idiom is mirrored in the textʼs syntactical constitution. It can be shown that the text obviously fulfills the needs of the users by creating single sentences in a rather simple way. The (missing) punctuation and the somewhat unsystematic capitalization might be seen as an inconsistency at first glance, as both these factors collide with the present day expectation to get a grip on sentence structures by looking at the nominal and verbal patterns which are united by capitalization after a full stop up to the next full stop. In my interpretation, however, the irrelevance of punctuation underlines and stresses a contemporary reception led by keywords and formulaic patterns.