Anglo-Norman words

The  revised semantic labeling system Already in the first published fascicle of AND 1 (back in the late 1970s), the English definitions sometimes were given a semantic category label. For example, sub  abatre 1 , the sense ‘to abate, put an end to’ was labelled ‘(law)’ and the sense ‘fir tree’ sub  abiet  had the label ‘(bot.)’. These bracketed items served to clarify the semantic context, identifying the first example as a legal term and the second as belonging to the semantic domain of botany .  However, even in the first phases of the AND 2 , no clear editorial policy, let alone statement, existed about what labels should be used, where or why. In practice these labels (eccl., orn., med., nav., culin., arithm. etc.)  were inserted  ad hoc , as and when an individual editor thought it would clarify a definition. As a result, such labels as were present were seriously inconsistent. (For further discussion of th...

In the new updated version of the AND site ( www.anglo-norman.net ), there are now various ways of adjusting the way an entry is displayed and, to a certain extent, to customize the dictionary’s interface. 1. Font size. You can enlarge or reduce the font size of displayed entries using the A+ and A- buttons on the button bar near the top of the screen . 2. Hide citations. You can hide or reveal the citations in a displayed entry using the ‘[SHOW/HIDE] Citations’ button, also on the button bar. Particularly in longer entries, this option may be useful to get a quick overview of the full semantic range of a word. It has to be noted that unlike the ‘sense boxes’ already available for a while in longer entries, this new feature includes a) all of the semantic tags and b) all locutions and their senses. 3. Display layout. Using the "gear wheel" setting icon at the top of the screen you can choose between three display layouts for the entry: "Co...

The alpha, but not quite yet the omega, of Greek lexis in Anglo-Norman. As primarily a Romance language, Anglo-Norman more often than not traces the origins of its lexis back to Latin. As such, determiner comes from determinare , leun 2 from leo and oreison from oratio – three entirely random but straightforward examples of how this type of development is so integral to the formation of a romance language that the AND will not highlight these words as Latin in origin. Evidently, Latin did not have exclusive rights to the formation of Anglo-Norman vocabulary – as our blogposts of the last few months have already testified, with examples from Mongolian (or not), Persian and Italian. Indeed, Anglo-Norman in its very nature is, to some extent, defined by an influx of Germanic, and specifically Anglo-Saxon/English, elements. For this month’s post we will take a look at the role of the second Classical language that contributed so much to the pan-European vocabulary: Greek. And w...

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...