Indo-European linguistics and classical philology
G. M. Vorobyev Theodore Gaza’s neologisms in his translation of Aristotle’s De animalibus and their reception in modern zoology (pp. 158–168)
Author
G. M. Vorobyev (Saint Petersburg State University)
Pages\n 158–168
Summary\n
Aristotle’s De animalibus had been the main source of scientific knowledge about animals till the 18th century, and Latin translations served as an important vehicle for its transmission. The first two Latin versions appeared in the 13th century. In the early 1450s another one, by the Greek scholar George of Trebizond, was made in Rome for Nicholas V, but it was considered of poor quality and soon fell into oblivion. It was another Byzantine, Theodore Gaza, who was commissioned to replace it with a new translation. Meeting the humanists’ taste, Gaza’s version that appeared in print in 1476 became soon extremely popular. As John Monfasani has shown, this Latin text exercised a virtual monopoly in the field of Aristotelian zoology for more than two centuries and influenced both the constitutio textus of the Greek editions of Aristotle and the new scientific writings in Latin. Gaza’s translation has been studied from the historical and stylistic points of view, but its vocabulary has not been object of a thorough analysis yet. Taking into consideration the influence of Gaza’s version, we presumed the possibility of discovering traces of its vocabulary in the modern zoological taxonomy. To check this hypothesis, we attempted a classification of Gaza’s renderings of Aristotle’s animal names and suggested a list of neologisms of Gaza’s coinage that could be used as handy material to test the reception of his translation on. Indeed, 25 out of the 47 neologisms introduced by Gaza turned out to have been used by the biologists of the 18th–19th centuries for the new taxonomic names in the binomial nomenclature; 11 out of these 25 remain valid in the nomenclature accepted nowadays.
Keywords\n
Theodore Gaza, Aristotle’s De animalibus, humanist translation, word coinage, Greek and Latin zoonyms, formation of zoological nomenclature.
References\n
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