Anglo-Norman words

Last month, we discussed the presence of loanwords from Irish in Anglo-Norman, and this month, we would like to look further into the linguistic contact between Anglo-Norman and Celtic languages – this time focusing on Welsh. While there has been considerable research into the influence of (Anglo-)French on the Welsh language, particularly in the literary sphere, linguistic contact between the two languages in the administrative and judicial spheres remains relatively poorly studied [1] .  Among the materials and sources used for the compilation of the AND we find two editions that bring together documents written in Wales by Welshmen: the Calendar of Ancient Correspondence Concerning Wales , and the Calendar of Ancient Petitions Relating to Wales . The former contains mainly records of correspondence between the English royal court and nobles in Wales, while the latter provides evidence of petitions from individuals throughout Wales to the English king. There are limitations ...

As part of my PhD thesis, I have been researching language contact between Anglo-Norman and dialects of medieval Italian. The AND currently only has five entries labelled as Italianisms: comyt < It. comito (‘first officer on a galley’); cotegnate < It. cotognato (‘quince jam’); fangot (sub fagot ) < It. fangotto (‘a bundle of cloth); sarme < It. sarma (‘a measure of capacity’) and sport < It. sporta (‘a basket’). [1] These words are all found in the same two sources from the city of Southampton: the Port Books of 1427-30 and the Local Port Book of 1435-36, administrative records which list the cargoes of the many Venetian and Genoese ships which docked in the Hampshire port in the early fifteenth century.   (Source: wikimedia commons; public domain) However, my research has found that there is much more evidence to be uncovered of Italian influence on Anglo-Norman. One of the semantic fields that showed numerous poten...

The primary focus of the present AND project involves the editing of those entries beginning with the letters N, O, P and U. In addition to this, the editors have designed and implemented a series of semantic tags, as we have mentioned in some of our previous posts. These tags have been developed to assist users in determining the semantic area in which a definition is applicable. It is envisaged that by early 2017, users of the dictionary will be able to search via the semantic tags, allowing them to extract all words used in a particular area (for example, all plant names, or all words relating to brewing, etc.). The examination of the semantic tags in use in the dictionary often shows us how important certain texts are to our understanding of a particular semantic field. While AND1 contained a [decor] tag, it was poorly used, originally flagging only 22 Anglo-Norman words. This tag is meant to highlight terms and senses "related to visual embellishment or adornment of obje...