Old English Glossaries: Creating a Vernacular

Abstract

Although glossaries constitute only 1% of the Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form, they are an interesting subset of the Corpus and are significant in the history of the language: they are the first English attempts at compiling bilingual dictionaries, from Latin to Old English. Two glossaries are examined in terms of how their information is accessible and the nature of their vocabulary: AElfric's Glossary, written at the start of the eleventh century, and the Epinal Glossary, written at the end of the seventh century. The logical order of the class glossary, such as AElfric's, is contrasted with the limited-alphabetical order of Epinal. The paper concludes on a methodological note, suggesting how the Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form provides a new research tool for analyzing the natural/unnatural language of these early glossaries.