Neologia na obra “Anatomia do Corpo Humano” de Bernardo Santucci (1739)

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the neologisms found in ten chapters of Anatomia do Corpo Humano, by Bernardo Santucci (1739), considered the first anatomy manual written in Portuguese. Santucci, an Italian physician who lived in Portugal, produced a work of great relevance for the consolidation of the medical-scientific vocabulary in the eighteenth century. Integrated into the project Historical Dictionary of Biological Terms, this study investigates the origin of anatomical and medical terms, considering the influence of Latin and Greek on the formation of the Portuguese scientific lexicon. The research is grounded in Diachronic Terminology (DT), which seeks to understand the transformation of technical terms over time, in association with the principles of Socioterminology and the Communicative Theory of Terminology (CTT). It also draws on studies of Neology, emphasizing retrospective neology and the processes of lexical specialization that occurred in the anatomical field. The corpus analyzed comprises chapters XI to XX of the first book of Santucci’s work, in which 26 lexical units of neological character were identified, belonging to anatomical terminology. The methodology involved comparing the terms recorded by Santucci with their occurrences in contemporary and historical dictionaries, such as the Dicionário Houaiss da Língua Portuguesa, the Oxford Latin Dictionary (OLD), Gaffiot’s Dictionnaire Latin-Français, and the Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ), as well as verifying their use in medical and scientific texts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Each term was described according to its grammatical class, definition, earliest attestation, and historical-etymological discussion. The results highlight the vitality and complexity of the medical lexicon of the period, demonstrating how Portuguese scientific language was structured through learned borrowings and lexical adaptations of classical origin. The study thus contributes to understanding the historical formation of anatomical vocabulary and to the diachronic documentation of medical-scientific terminology in the Portuguese language.