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...

Outre-mer (see TLF ) is a French term that can be used to refer to faraway countries, be it in Africa, the Orient or America. It is a direct translation of the Latin ultra mare , literally ‘across the sea’, which in its adjectival form ultramarinus (cf. DMLBS 3545a), also produced the English word ultramarine : the blue pigment derived from the mineral lapis lazuli which, in medieval times, was imported from Asia by sea. Within a medieval context, Outremer also became a word used to refer to the Crusaders’ Holy Land and more specifically to the French settlements in the conquered territories of the Near or Middle East: the lands ‘across the sea’. It is mainly with that latter sense that outremer was used in English (OED Outremer n. ), albeit only from the first half of the nineteenth century, when it makes its first attested appearance, rather surprisingly, in the Longfellow’s travel book Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea : ‘I, too, in a certain sense, have been a pilgrim...