Anglo-Norman words

Here's another opportunity to work with/for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary: Ph.D. Studentship Aberystwyth University: Department of European Languages, Anglo-Norman Dictionary Project Following the award in July 2012 of a (further) AHRC grant to support the Anglo-Norman Dictionary project, under way since 2001 ( www.anglo-norman.net ), Aberystwyth University is funding a Ph.D. studentship in association with the AND. The University is offering “a PhD Studentship with a specific remit that includes the development of specialist skills in the subject”, the aim being “both [to] aid the employability of the student and help provide continuity to your project”. The studentship, then, is intended to be a form of capacity building and also consolidation. Candidates should have at least a 2.1 (or equivalent) degree and normally a Master’s degree, normally in French. Previous experience of medieval French and/or of historical Romance linguistics is also expected. The thesi...

The word alphabetum , which is well attested in classical Latin, is found in British medieval Latin from the sixth century and again in Bede (DMLBS 1,69b). It appears, however, that the vernacular languages in use in England in the Middle Ages (English and Anglo-Norman) did not incorporate it, but prefered either ABC , or words derived from that. David Crystal’s  Story of English in 100 Words  (London: Profile Books, 2011) notes that the word alphabet does not occur in English until the sixteenth century. Hardly surprising in some ways, one might think, since the word is derived from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet ( alpha ,  beta ), and Greek was not much studied in England before the Renaissance. But the situation is not quite that simple. Firstly, the word alphabet  is in fact found in English rather earlier than Crystal claims: both the OED and the MED provide a first attestation from an anonymous translation of Ranulf Higden’s...