Crealscience

The beginning of a French scientific language before Modern times – and especially in the middle Ages, is frequently ignored because of the lack of knowledge about French medieval texts for this field and because of the difficulty to have a panoramic view of the terminological creation in this language, while his aim was however to express knowledge. This research project, multidisciplinary, for which about twenty philologists, linguists, computer scientists, and historians of sciences work together, aim to investigate about this unknown field by a connecting research about processes of terminological creation at the beginning of scientific French texts (12th -15th century) and the creation of an electronic dictionary and new technology (computer programs, tagging of texts). The selected period seems crucial because, at this time, French likes a language for knowledge as Latin when scientific concepts change next to Aristotelian ideas and Arabic and Greek commentators. Astronomical French texts, of which the first, Philippe de Thaon’s Comput, has been written at the beginnings of the 12th century, will be specially studied: astronomy, at this time, is said the most marvellous science of quadrivium. The project CREALSCIENCE, focused on medieval French which seems a nodal point, unite a research about dictionary to make obvious language processes and relation between texts and dictionary to several questions: function of fields of knowledge, connection between term and concept, syntactic and semantic relations of terms. He wants to contribute to a better knowledge of the beginnings of vernacular terminology and processes of terminological creation as well as new technological application for a dynamic description of vocabulary. At the end, published works will be: . The Dictionnaire du Français Scientifique Médiéval (DFSM) and his Web site for a panoramic view of scientific words. . Several publications on line or books, especially astronomical sources. . An atlas of medieval terminology on line. This research project is realised by two partners: 1/ EA 4089 Sens Texte Informatique Histoire- université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) 2/ UMR 7187 Lexiques Dictionnaire Informatique