Abstrakt: | The word (signifler) “sublime” appeared for the first time in English in the
Middle Ages and there was nothing unusual about it. Alchemists used it. To
sublime meant to “subject (a substance) to the action of heat in a vessel so as to
convert it into vapour, which is carried off and on cooling is deposited in
a solid form”. Latin was the language of research and, in such contexts, the
use of a Latin word in any vernacular must have been seen as a matter of
course. The appearance of the word was in a sense necessary because alchemy
(which is a Greek or Arabic derivation meaning “the art of transmutation”)
needed predicates to denote and relate its activities. The simple words like
burn, cool, etc. were to be found in the vernacular, but not those denoting more
complex activities, such as transmute, sublime or calcine. These had to be taken
from Latin — transmutare, sublimare, calcinare — though in the case of English
usually indirectly, through French. |