5. A semantic field and text-type approach to late-medieval multilingualism

Sylvester, Louise

doi:10.1515/9781501504945-005

Cited by 18 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…A popular way of conceptualising lexical material from several languages has been in terms of borrowings/code-switches from an embedded language into a matrix language. More recent research (inter alia, Trotter 2000Trotter , 2011Ingham 2010;Hunt 2011;Schendl and Wright 2011;Sylvester 2017) has underscored how such terms may not fully reflect the complex linguistic ecology of late medieval England. The inclusion of the same lexical items in the DMLBS, the OED and the Middle English Dictionary (Lewis et al, 1952(Lewis et al, -2001henceforth, MED) proves the permeable linguistic boundaries in the Middle Ages and beyond.…”

Section: Lexical Borrowings Code-switches or Something Else?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Old English-Origin Words in a Set Of Medieval Latin Accounts

Roig‐Marín

2022

J. engl. stud. (Logroño, internet)

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For a long time, texts in Medieval Latin were poorly regarded for their linguistic hybridity: alongside Classical/post-Classical Latin lexemes, there were many words coming from the vernaculars (in the case of late medieval England, Anglo-French and Middle English) embedded in them. This traditional and restrictive view was superseded by a more nuanced conception of multilingualism, which appreciates the value of this kind of written evidence for our understanding of the multilingual dynamics of medieval texts. The present investigation uses a case study, the Account Rolls of the Abbey of Durham [1278-1538] (Fowler 1898-1901; henceforth, Durham Account Rolls), one of the largest edited and published collections of accounts in Medieval Latin, to discuss broader issues such as how to classify the vernacular lexical items present in medieval multilingual texts (are they borrowings, code-switches, or something else?) and to what extent this vocabulary can be deemed to be integrated/unintegrated into Medieval Latin. Since there are multiple underlying languages in the vernacular vocabulary of the Durham Account Rolls, this article will concentrate on the Old English-origin lexis in these accounts and its relation to Latin and French. An overview of 263 simplex (one-element) Old English-origin forms in the Durham Account Rolls proved to be a source of both basic-level terms and more specialised terminology. Finally, some examples from the most representative semantic domains (equipment, farming, animals, and materials) will be given.

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