What Terms to Express the Categories of Natural Sciences in the Dictionary of Medieval Scientific French?

This paper deals with several lexicographic problems arising from the choice of hypernyms in the Dictionary of Medieval Scientific French (Créalscience database). The generic names used by medieval scholars indicate categorizations which differ from modern classifications. We examine some cases selected from the medieval domain of natural sciences where we can notice a conceptual discrepancy between medieval and modern taxonomies. We first explain the kind of difficulties the editors encounter when they choose a generic name to give a medieval definition, by taking examples in the fields of botany (arbre, herbe, courge), mineralogy (mineral, pierre, metal) and above all, zoology (poisson, coquille, ver, mouche, bête). In order to avoid anachronisms and allow the users to understand conceptual gaps, several means are used by the editors of the Dictionary: indicating by an asterisk the words whose meaning has changed and specifying the identification corresponding to the modern categorizations at the end of definition or in an encyclopedic note. After presenting these lexicographic choices, we will wonder how Semantic Web can help to represent and understand this variable lexicon.