Anglo-Norman words

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...

Last week, the lay-out and presentation of the online AND [ http://www.anglo-norman.net ] was updated (for the first time since it was opened to the public back in 2006!), making it compatible for use on computers, tablets or handheld devices and adding new features. In the next couple of blog-posts, we will talk you through some of the possibilities and changes. One immediately striking difference is that the main AND page now has two search boxes – two main ways of accessing entries in the dictionary. 1. Use ‘jump to’ for browsing the alphabetical list of headwords. At start-up, the left-hand area of the screen shows a segment of the headword list starting with the first entry. As before, forms in  white  link directly to a substantive entry. Forms in   yellow indicate a cross-reference headword, and lead automatically to the referenced substantive entry or entries. Click or tap on a headword to fetch the entry into the main area of the screen. ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...