The Folk Medicine Concept in Vernacular English of the XIX Century

Abstract

The research is devoted to studying the Folk Medicine concept in English based on British ethnographic and folklore materials, as well as dictionaries of dialects published in the XIX and early XX centuries. The work aims to analyse the Folk Medicine concept and its representation as a component of the folk world picture, verbalised in that time‟s medical language, the core of which is a set of folk nominations used to denote folk names of diseases associated with ancient medical practices. On the periphery, folk texts represent superstitions as necessary constituents of folk medical practices connected with the mentioned nominal units. A comprehensive methodology of conceptual analysis allowed identifying the basic ideas about Folk Medicine. Based on the statement that the meaningful component of the Folk Medicine concept is realised in the folk consciousness, the key verbalised nominations‟ definitions denoting the disease names, and their compatibility with adjectives and verbs, were analysed. The influence of medical rites and rituals on the semantics of lexical units was proved. The analysis identified the basic semantic features of the Folk Medicine concept, including ethnonymic, colourative, anthroponymic, mythological, spatial and temporal components.