Plant Names in an Old Medical Manuscript “TabibnÂme”

Abstract

Tabibnâme was written by Fakîr Ahmed Şeyhzâde in the 18th century. The manuscript is in Turkish and includes the subjects of alternative medicine, pharmacy and plant science. The text also consists of political, religious, moral, medical and philosophical information. Therefore, Tabibnâme is very important both in terms of the information it contains about Turkish language and Turkish cultural history and medicine and pharmacy terminology due to its vocabulary use and linguistic features. 101 plant names were used in Tabibnâme. In this article, we examined these plant names in terms of diachronic phonetic changes. In addition, we examined whether or not these names are used in Turkish. Today, 35 plant names are used with various phonetic changes and 46 plant names are used in the same forms and 20 plant names are no longer used in Turkish. 27 plant names are Turkish, 25 are Arabic, 22 are Persian, 18 are Greek and 1 is Indonesian. 8 plant names are observed crosslinguistically. 101 plant names were used for 152 times in Tabibnâme. In addition, 7 plant names were used 14 times with the subtype names.