Mythonymic Terms in Lithuania’s First Psychiatry Textbook from the Inter-war Era

Abstract

The article structurally dissects the psychiatry terms made with the names of mythological creatures that appear in the 1935 Įvadas į psichiatriją (Introduction to Psychiatry) by Juozas Blažys, the famous Lithuanian psychiatrist – the first psychiatry textbook to be published in Lithuania in the period between the two world wars. Nearly all terms are derived from the classical (Greek and Latin) languages or are readily borrowed from them through intermediary languages and adapted to the system of the Lithuanian language. While writing the textbook, Blažys relied on printed work by his colleagues and most probably adopted the terms from those sources. Mythonyms of Greek and Latin origin that appear in the structure of psychiatry terms are archaic universalities with unequivocal meaning across all languages; as a result, the psychiatry terms that derive from them travel from one language to the next, constituting an important part of the international eponymic terminology of psychiatry.

Most of the terms featured in the textbook are mythonyms made by way of absolute (direct, affixal, and composite) and, on very few occasions, partial appellativisation. The most common are composite appellatives (such as kleptomanija (kleptomania)) that include a component grounded on a post-positional mythonym. Among affixal appellatives, suffixal appellatives with the productive suffix -izmas (such as morfinizmas (morphinism)) have prevalence, while prefixal appellatives (such as amnezija (amnesia)) are uncommon.