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Showing posts from September, 2016

WoM: 'galahoth', 'cumant' or ten thousand Mongolian hats

While the AND is primarily designed to give definitions for words found in medieval British literary and administrative texts, what it can also do is offer us insights into the linguistic reality of a medieval, multilingual Britain. While the tradition (and erroneous) view was that only the nobility used Anglo-Norman, while the other classes remained Anglophone, research by a number of scholars has shown that there was considerable interaction between Anglo-Norman and other languages during the period, and that a number of individuals were literate in multiple languages. An analysis of lexical borrowings into Anglo-Norman can offer some clues about the circles in which the language circulated. The AND has a set of language tags that it adds to entries when the editors consider that the word is a borrowing from another language and not fully naturalized. It's not a comment on the etymology of the word, but more of an acknowledgement by the editors that the word retains some of