Glossae Latino-Anglicae: il lessico ittico nei glossari anglosassoni

Abstract

This paper deals with the lexicon of aquatic animals in Anglo-Saxon as we can infer it from old English glossaries. A good number of glossaries dating back to the Middle Ages are preserved; in them we can find either Latin-Latin or bilingual glosses, in particular Latin-Old English. In this paper I will only focus on the latter group. In Section 1 (Introduction) I outline a sort of status quo in relation to the various typologies of documents containing Old English glosses, and discussing whether different works supposed distinct kind of users. The article also deals with the problem of sources of lemmata attested in the glossaries I studied. In Section 2 I briefly give the list of the glossaries I analysed and I focus on the dating of the texts and their edition. Section 3 contains the most important part of this paper: the Old English glosses to a large amount of Latin fishnames are gathered and classified. My main aim is discussing etymological problems with special regard to the other Germanic languages and possible links with Indo-European idioms, both from a diachronic and a synchronic point of view. The conclusion – in Section 4 – tries to sum up and give an overview of this lexical field.

DOI: 10.4424/lam32014-6