Anglo-Norman words

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...

As the editors of the AND work their way towards the end of the revision of the letter ‘P’, one of the entries being rewritten is that of the colour purpre , that is, ‘purple’ [1] . Defining what that means is trickier than it first appears, as is often the case with colour words. Is purple a colour in the pink/red family or is it a shade of blue? To further complicate matters, there are in fact numerous words used in Anglo-Norman to refer to different shades of purple, some of which we’ll look at here. Purpre derives from the Latin purpura [DMLBS 2584c] , and doesn’t refer always to the colour we now know as purple. Originally, the term referred to the shade of dye obtained from a sea snail, which was a variable crimson or reddish shade, which is also known as Tyrian purple. The blue-purple colour found in medieval manuscripts is often plant based, normally from the plant known as turnsole though this colour was also created using a variety of other plants and berries. [2]...