Band 119, Heft 2

This article explores the multiple ways in which Aldred, the glossator of the Lindisfarne Gospels , rendered proper names, both place-names and personal names. It shows that there is no support in the corpus to maintain that Aldred left most of the proper names unglossed; on the contrary, he accomplished a painstaking job. In this respect, the article examines how the glosses provide the reader with information not only about the meaning of a particular name, but also about certain biblical conceptions and interpretations, behind which the view of the Fathers of the Church can be identified. The analysis of the glosses reveals that Aldred was a careful glossator, aware of linguistic features, whose work was nothing similar to the mechanical translation of the Latin text.

Abstract: To denote personal agents, the poet of Beowulf very frequently resorts to words in -a and -end (ca. 70 and ca. 40 different instances respectively, including compounds such as æsc-wiga 2042, gar-wigend 2641, etc.) while this heroic epic provides only one instance of a derivative in -ere , i. e. leas-sceaweras (253). This article examines formations in -ere in Old English verse texts as opposed to prose texts and demonstrates the rare occurrence of the suffix -ere in verse, for which different factors are shown to be responsible: some formations in -ere seem to have entered the language later in Old English so that they would have found little acceptance in conservative poetic diction; others could not have been readily adapted for use in verse on metrical grounds; the formations in -ere would have been blocked by the great number of synonymous lexemes already available; some words in -ere might not have found their way into poetic language since they might have been used only within a narrow range of technical vocabulary or they might have been nonce words. The paper concludes with a brief examination of the use of -ere words in Old English prose texts, especially in Ælfric's and Wulfstan's works, to show that these two contemporary authors differ noticeably as to the use of words in -ere .

Abstract: This paper aims to ascertain as precisely as possible what direct influence the early monolingual word lists and dictionaries may have had on the standardisation of English spelling. It is based upon research in which a quantitative analysis of the spellings of lemmas from the nine earliest published such lists and dictionaries was made and followed by a comparison of these lemmas and their spellings with the spellings from a manuscript and printed text of appropriate date. These word lists and dictionaries range from Mulcaster 1582 to Cockeram 1626, and the manuscript and printed copies of the same text are by William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle and dated c. 1659 and 1667 respectively. A qualitative investigation into the nature of the words and spellings occurring in the data was then undertaken. The results show a high degree of consistency within and between the word lists and dictionaries and printed Newcastle text but no significant correspondence between these spellings and those found in the manuscript. The research indicates that the spellings of the printed lists and text may be taken as the standard spellings of those words in that period (and this includes both variable spellings and those which later changed into our present standard forms) but that the manuscript writing, at least this case, remains largely unaffected by the standard. Whereas the lack of correspondence between these two bodies of data may be due to the sample of lay writing chosen, the lexical and grammatical restrictions of lemmas in word lists and dictionaries of this period set precise and important limits to the extent to which they can have directly influenced the course of spelling standardisation.

Thomas D. Hill, “When the Leader is Brave …”: An Old English Proverb and its Vernacular Context Phyllis Portnoy, Lexical Figments and Fallacies: The Case of Old English lāf Simon Horobin, The Language of the Fifteenth-Century Printed Editions of The Canterbury Tales

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