Anglo-Norman words

It is mid-afternoon and the editorial team of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary is producing XML files of the latest batch of new entries for N-. They have been sitting in front of their computers and processing the data for about six hours now, and their typing fingers are noticeably slowing down. It is still too early to call it a day, but minds are inevitably beginning to wander. Fortunately, a resolution for the growing three-o’clock malaise is found in the Oxford English Dictionary under the word ‘ nuncheon ’, that is, ‘a drink taken in the afternoon; a light refreshment between meals; a snack’. ‘Nuncheon’ is a word labelled as archaic or regional – the sort of vocabulary encountered in nineteenth-century novels: Sir Walter Scott still wrote ‘I came to get my four-hours’ nunchion from you’ in his novel Fortunes Of Nigel (1822), and in Charlotte Mary Yonge’s Love and Life (1880) a sister tells her siblings ‘I will give you some bread and cheese and gingerbread for noonchin ’. ...

While the work of revising the dictionary often results in new citations added to articles, or to new definitions added to existing entries, adding a new word to the dictionary is always very exciting. Sometimes, in the process, we also manage to solve some editorial ‘mysteries’. In the recent edition of the Prose Brut to 1332 (H. Pagan, ed. ANTS vol. 69, 2011), we can  read that, ‘ Robert de Winchelse et autrez grauntz fusrent juretz sur la croice neite de tenir et maintenir lez dites ordenances ’ (l. 5797 ; Robert of Winchelsea [bishop of Canterbury] and other great [men] swore on the ‘croice neite’ to hold and maintain the said ordinances). In the glossary and notes to the text, it is suggested that neite is a form of net (AND2 s.v. net , soon to be net 1 ) though there is also a mention that one manuscript presents the reading nettement . Neit is indeed an attested variant of net , though none of the senses of net (currently ‘clean’, ‘pure, chaste’, ‘innocent’) seem ...

In the first edition of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (1985, for the M-O/U fascicle), the entry for noche is rather minimalistic: the definition provided is simply ‘notch’, which, obviously, is nothing more than the same word in Modern English. (The -tch spelling is merely an English equivalent for French -ch , as is also found in, for example, hache#3 vs. English hatch , or lache#1 vs. latch , and cache#2 vs. catch ). The entry lists only one spelling variant, and contains a single citation, taken from the Yearbooks of Edward II (vol. xvii, p. 179), illustrating the sense: ‘et mist avant un taille ensealé qe avoit .xvj. noches et suprascripciun’ (‘ and he produced a sealed tally stick, which had 16 notches and [an] inscription ’) No indication is given as to whether the word is at all common in Anglo-Norman or whether its appearance here is a ‘one-off’ – a hapax legomenon . For the second (online) edition of the AND, all words starting with N- are currently being revi...

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...