Interlinear Glosses Research Articles

Of Rare and Obsolete Words

Abstract Older residents of the Modern Western Aramaic-speaking village of Maaloula are keenly aware of the progressive impoverishment of their lexicon as the younger generations come to maturity without direct knowledge of traditional ways of life and material culture. In this short Modern Western Aramaic text, two such residents discuss both the localities in which these ways of life unfolded and the words associated with them, which have become rare and even obsolete among contemporary speakers. The text is furnished with interlinear morphosyntactic glosses, a short lexicon of terms that do not appear in the standard dictionary of Modern Western Aramaic (NWAW), a translation into the local vernacular Arabic, and images illustrating the words and the locations that the speakers discuss.

A diachronic study determining syntactic and semantic features of Urdu-English neural machine translation

Machine translation produces marginal accuracy rates for low-resource languages, but its deep learning model expects to yield improved accuracy with time. This longitudinal study investigates how Google Translate's Urdu-to-English translated output has evolved between 2018 and 2021. Accuracy and acceptability of the translations have been determined by, a) an interlinear gloss that identifies core semantic units and grammatical functions to be translated and, b) a descriptive comparison of the translated text's syntactic and semantic properties with those of the source text. Overall, despite a 50 % error rate that persists over the three-year interval, the research reports significant improvement in the overall intelligibility of the translations, in contrast to initial results from 2018, which exhibited rampant non-localized errors. Working backwards from instances of errors to morphosyntactic and semantic patterns underlying them, the study concludes that the pro-drop feature of Urdu, Urdu's case-marking system, identification of clause boundaries, polysemous terms, and orthographically similar words pose the greatest difficulty in neural machine translation. These results point to the need for incorporating syntactic information in training data.

Te Deum в кириллической транскрипции с подстрочным церковнославянским переводом

The Latin Psalter from the Chudov monastery, written in Cyrillic letters around the end of the 15th century, is a document of paramount importance for the study of the Latin cultural tradition in Muscovy. This unique manuscript seems to be linked to the fervent translation activity directed by the archbishop of Novgorod Gennadii (1484–1504). The wide space left between the lines of the main Latin text was without doubt supposed to be filled with the Church Slavic corresponding text. A Slavic “translation” was indeed inserted into the biblical cantica and other texts, among which the hymn Te Deum, traditionally (and wrongly) considered to be a joint composition by Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, which was very widespread in the Western Church.
 The article features the first diplomatic interlinear edition of the Slavic-Latin Te Deum, which is preceded by a short description and analysis of the Slavic text and its main linguistic peculiarities in comparison with another translation of the same work, made some decades later by Dmitry Gerasimov. Here all relevant differences between the two Slavic versions, both at the lexical and grammatical levels, are presented and shortly discussed. Further, some evident errors in the Slavic text of the Chudov Psalter cast some doubts on the possibility to consider it a real translation in the strict sense of the term; it seems rather to function as a lexico-grammatical interlinear gloss, to be read vertically as an auxiliary tool for a proper understanding of the Latin original.

Exploring the Impact of Interlinear vs. L1 Marginal Glosses on Iraqi EFL Learner’s L2 Vocabulary Learning

This study investigates the impact of interlinear vs. L1 marginal glosses on the Iraqi Learning of vocabulary in EFL instructional setting. Along with all the efforts made during past 3 decades to improve the teaching of vocabulary via various strategies and techniques countywide, the classical grammar-translation method and its offspring are still widely used in most schools in Iraq. By analyzing the elicited data out of the management, treatment, and assessment of 92 pre-university students studying in two high schools in Iraq, the inquirer observed a reliable improvement of vocabulary learning in participants. To examine the effectiveness of the two glossing strategies, i.e., the implantation of L1 marginal and interlinear glosses, the results of pre and post-test of three groups were compared using One-Way ANOVA. We found reliable difference between the two groups in post-test vocabulary learning. Consequently, L1 marginal and Interlinear glosses both have come to make the learners understand L2 texts well, in comparison with the other group. Ultimately, Marginal glossing is more effective than the interlinear (text) glossing in the improvement of vocabulary development of Iraqi EFL learners.

Semantic Overlapping Between Latin and Old English Verbs of Seeing in Interlinear Glosses

In the conclusions of Penttilä (1956: 174–79),1 Old English verbs of vision are classified into three groups: power of vision (geseon, locian), perceptional seeing (seon, sceawian, behealdan, ongietan, geseon, besceawian, gesceawian, gehawian, gestarian), and intentional seeing (seon, sceawian, behealdan, locian, hawian, wlitan, wlatian, starian; beseon, geseon, besceawian, gesceawian, gelocian). It is obvious that some verbs belong to two groups. The same is true when the classification is done from Latin verbs which appear in interlinear glosses and among Old English verbs used in translation. In my data of the Psalter Glosses (hereafter PsGl),2 Canticles (PsCa), the Four Gospels (Gosp), Liber Scintillarum (LibSc), the Rule of St Benedict (BenRGl), and Durham Ritual (DurRitGl), the following Latin verbs of seeing appear in the texts: ‘to see’ (uidere), ‘to look at, up, down, forward’, etc. (aspicere, circumspicere, considerare, conspicere, contemplari, despicere, inspicere, intueri, pr(a)evidere, perspicere, prospicere, providere, respicere, sperare, speculari, suspicere), and ‘to watch, take care of’ (attendere, cauere, conseruare, custodire, intendere, obseruare).

Lexical Glosses in Cambridge, University Library, Kk. 3.18

Abstract Cambridge, University Library, Kk.3.18, the latest extant copy of the Old English Bede, is a remarkably reader-oriented manuscript. Consistently punctuated, rubricated, and furnished with the list of chapter headings, chapter numbers, and continuous running titles, it is easy to read and navigate. Complementing these signposts are lexical interlinear glosses. Many of them are dialectally unmarked variants of Anglian and obsolete/obsolescent vocabulary as well as nonce formations. Another subset consists of the alternatives to the words that were probably familiar to the late Anglo-Saxon audience. These additions enhance the translation similarly to the multiple psalter glosses. The third group corrects copying errors by supplying a reading found in other manuscripts. On the whole, these glosses offer an apparatus that facilitates a better understanding of Bede’s Latin composition and its Old English translation. In addition, they provide invaluable information about the development of the Early English lexicon and the scribes’ active repertoire and linguistic preferences.

On the Printed Fragment in Classical Mongolian Script from the Collection of IOM, RAS

The Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences possesses a xylographed fragment in classical Mongolian script with a handwritten text on the reverse side (call mark G 110 recto), which was obtained in 1909 during P. K. Kozlov’s expedition in Khara-Khoto. The printed text in classical Mongolian script with several interlinear glosses in Chinese and a page footer (of the transcription of the Chinese name of the chapter and the page number) was read by the Soviet Orientalist N. Ts. Munkuyev more than 50 years ago. Munkuyev dated it by the XIV century based on the paleographic peculiarities. Moreover, based on the official history Yuan shi, he supposed that the text might be a Mongolian translation of the legislative code Da Yuan tong-zhi and suggested two possible versions of original Chinese name of the chapter, out of which an incorrect one was unfortunately chosen. Since Da Yuan tong-zhi was not preserved in full and the major part of the written monument including the chapters of interest were lost, it was impossible to find the text in scope, and the mistake in the reconstruction of the chapter name also could not be detected. However, in 2002 in South Korea a part of Zhi-zheng tiao-ge code was found, which was promulgated in 1346 and was intended to replace the outdated Da Yuan tong-zhi. In one of his previous articles, the author has shown that both codes were built according to a general pattern elaborated as far back as the Tang epoch (618–907). This enabled reconstruction of the name of the chapter mentioned in the fragment. Fortunately, the surviving part of the Zhi-zheng tiao-ge code contains the required chapters, and the Chinese glosses in the fragment allowed us to find the original Chinese text, which turned out to be a document dated 1303 and, according to the date, was evidently included in both codes. The article also contains the Chinese text of the document and its annotated translation.

Zur Übersetzungstechnik in den ‘Wachtendonckschen psalmen’

Abstract The Old Dutch ‘Wachtendonck Psalms’ [10th C.] survive in fragmentary transcripts from the 16th and 17th centuries. The now-lost original manuscript contained an interlinear gloss that shows different levels of ability in translating the Latin text of the Psalms. Sometimes, the translation displays a good knowledge of Latin and at other times serious flaws can be observed. On the basis of this, this article suggests that there was more than one person involved in translating the Latin text.

El diluvio (Tlaa:wetsilis). Una narración en náhuatl de la Huasteca Veracruzana

This narrative is about the Great Flood and the creation of man and is told in the Nahuatl language of Tzocohuite in the municipality of Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz. The myth begins with two actions carried out by the first inhabitants, a man and a woman, actions disapproved of by God, who punishes them. He sends his emissary, the rabbit, to tell the man to build an ark to save the animals and thus eliminates humans from the face of the Earth. After the Great Flood there are other events involving animals including the vulture, the dove and the hummingbird. Finally, man is punished with work and the rabbit retires to the moon, rewarded for having completed God’s orders. The Nahuatl text is presented together with a Spanish translation and interlinear morphological glosses.

«Ай да Пушкин? Пушкин - это айда!»: о пушкинском слове в поэзии перестройки

This article is devoted to Perestroika poets referring to the Pushkin text as a ‘tuning fork’ in reconfiguring poetics. The study aims to show that, in this case, intertextual connection create a special text-within-a-text. The corpus, intertextual, and compositional methods are used to analyse Pushkin-invoking texts by Yuri Arabov, Vladimir Druk, Timur Kibirov, and other poets. It is concluded that these authors perceive Pushkin’s poetry as a lexicon whose units can be used for building countless cycles of poetic reflections on the world as well as on poetry and the role of the poet. The donor text is an interlinear gloss for the recipient text. The implicit ‘alien’ and the explicit ‘own’ words merge into a single text. Perestroika poets inherit from Pushkin polystylism, a propensity to parody when analysing cultural codes and prece­dent texts, and fundamental dialogicity. Particular attention is paid to variations on the theme of Pushkin's ‘Monument’ as well as the symbolism of his name, which turned into somewhat of a common noun used to refer to any poet. The predominance of allusions to quotes in references to Pushkin points to the desire of perestroika poets engage in an equal dialogue with the national genius. At the same time, the Pushkin text becomes for them the point at which the semantic perspective of both a concrete poetic utterance and poetry as a whole is refracted.

Verbal morphology in the Old English gloss to the Durham Collectar

AbstractThis article examines the verbal morphology of the Old English interlinear gloss to the Durham Collectar, attributed by almost universal consensus to Aldred of Chester-le-Street, whose earlier gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels has recently been the object of scholarly attention (Cole 2014;Fernández Cuesta & Pons-Sanz 2016,Gameson et al. 2017). This article analyses -s/-thvariation in the present indicative and imperative forms in relation to their syntactic context, in particular subject type and subject-verb adjacency, in order to assess whether the Northern Subject Rule detected byCole (2014)in Lindisfarne was also operative in Aldred’s later gloss. By means of a quantitative analysis, we find that the first constraint does not significantly affect -s/-ðvariation in the gloss and that there is insufficient context for the second. Additionally, it is argued that adjacency is a problematic variable in this text-type. We also demonstrate that there is a higher percentage of second person singular -stand -ðin the Collectar than in Lindisfarne and discuss the possible influence of standard West Saxon on the later gloss.

Magyar nyelvemlékszövegek egy 16. század eleji pálos misekönyvben

One of the few copies of a Pauline missal printed in 1514 (National Széchényi Library, shelfmark: RMK III, 196/2) has preserved mixed Hungarian and Latin inscriptions entered above the pericopes (approx. 400 Hungarian words). The paper discusses the publication history and the binding of the missal, as well as the corrections made on the Latin text. However, first of all, it presents the newly discovered Hungarian-language texts. This finding is an important source for the history of the Hungarian language on due to the great number of words and phrases and to the age of the notes, which can be dated to the first half of the 16th century. Its importance is enhanced by the fact that it furnishes new data on the process of translating the Bible into Hungarian. This is only the first stage of the research, but we can already state that the writer of the glosses probably followed that branch of the textual tradition (presumably shaped in orality) which was recorded in the Döbrentei Codex. The two translation are closely related. Our hypothesis is that they follow the Pauline tradition. According to the owner’s note, the book belonged to a cleric named Albert, who entered his name into it backwards (mutrebla). It is probably that this denomination hid Albert of Csanád, the famous Pauline preacher. As the interlinear glosses may have served as an aid to preaching, it can be inferred that it was he who glossed the biblical passages to help him with his sermons. This hypothesis has to be confirmed or contradicted by future analyses of the texts’ forma and content.

«OZYMANDIAS» BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLY TRANSLATED INTO RUSSIAN AND ARMENIAN (V. BRUSOV, K. BALMONT, E. AVAGYAN)

The paper deals with the interlinear glosses of translations by V. Brusov, K. Balmont and E. Avagyan of Percy Bysshe Shelly’s «Ozymandias ». Translation analysis concludes that V. Brusov’s translation is close to the original sonnet, however, he did not manage to keep the source’s form. K. Balmont’s translation is clearly perceptible for elevated style, which is not typical for the original source. E. Avagyan did not translate but reproduces the language close to the original sonnet and added some epithets

Linguistic methodologies for investigating and representing multiple languages in mathematics education research

ABSTRACTResearching how mathematical expression varies in different languages requires methodologies which allow investigation of languages on their own terms and the presentation of mathematical data in multiple languages. Perspectives and tools from linguistics can assist in identifying and describing mathematical expression in varied languages, particularly those without a school mathematics register. A typological approach, which deals with finding, describing and classifying languages according to their structural similarities and differences, is useful to investigate how a mathematical function or process is performed in different ways in different languages. Interactive structured tasks can elicit rich and targeted mathematical language data, where details of mathematically language are difficult to elicit through direct questions and interviewing. An interlinear morphemic gloss can be used to show more information about the structure of short texts in languages other than the publication language. Such research is an ideal forum for collaboration between mathematics education researchers and linguists.

From Venice to Aleppo: Early Printing of Scripture in the Orthodox World

The Bible, as the etymology of the word indicates, refers not to one book but to many. The Christian Bible is made up of the Old Testament, that is, the Jewish Scriptures, and the New Testament; moreover, for some Churches, among them the Orthodox, certain books commonly called the Apocrypha , which were added to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, also fonn part of the Bible. The Bible is thus a small library, and as is common in libraries, some books are more popular than others. Long before the introduction of printing, the varying degrees of importance accorded to different books of the Bible led to some of them being translated before others. For instance, in Anglo-Saxon England, interlinear glosses (i.e. crude word-by-word translations) were made of the Gospels and Psalms, and separate portions of the Bible, including the Gospels, were rendered into Old English (Anonymous 1997: 200). Likewise, the earliest known written translations of parts of the Bible into Arabic are of the Gospels and Psalms; they can be dated to the 8th century. Oral translations are older, going back to pre-Islamic times (Graf 1944: 114-115, 138; Griffith 2012: 123-126). By contrast, the first attempt to produce a complete Bible in Arabic occurred only in the l 61h century (Graf 1944: 89-90).

Subject and adjacency effects in the Old Northumbrian gloss to theLindisfarne Gospels

The subject and adjacency effects found to condition the distribution of present verbal morphology in northern Middle English, and commonly referred to as the Northern Subject Rule (NSR), are generally regarded to be an Early Middle English development that did not condition the distribution of verbal morphology in northern varieties of Old English (Isaac 2003; Pietsch 2005; de Haas 2008; de Haas & van Kemenade 2015). Using data taken from the tenth-century interlinear gloss to theLindisfarne Gospels, this study considers variation between the present-tense markers -ðand -sin Late Old Northumbrian and discusses evidence which indicates that the subject and adjacency effects at the crux of the NSR were already operative in Old Northumbrian with different morphological material. The findings also debunk the traditional conviction that -sspread first to second-person plural contexts and only subsequently to the third-person plural and singular (Holmqvist 1922; Blakeley 1949/50; Stein 1986).

THE ALPHABET OF WORDS IN THE DURHAM COLLECTAR AN EDITION WITH TWO NEW MANUSCRIPT WITNESSES

The Alphabet of Words (AW), a Latin alphabet text with an interlinear Old English gloss, occurs among the additions made to the Durham Collectar (D) by the priest Aldred in the tenth century. Previously thought to be extant only in D, and possibly by Aldred himself, AW also survives (without the OE gloss) in a Kassel manuscript (K) from the second half of the eighth century, as well as in a defective twelfth-century copy in Karlsruhe (Kr). Most of AW is also incorporated in a Latin treatise on the alphabet (“Audiuimus multos”: AM) compiled probably in the ninth century. AW belongs to the genre of “parenetic alphabet,” widely attested in Greek but also sporadically in Latin, including in a ninth-century Paris manuscript (P: BNF, lat. 2796) that shares lemmata and glosses with AW for the letters X, Y, and Z. We provide the first critical edition and translation of AW from D, K, and Kr, with variants from AM and P, together with a discussion of AW’s genre and relation to other alphabetical texts as well as a full commentary on the biblical, apocryphal, and patristic lore transmitted by AW’s lemmata and glosses on each letter.

The Old English Gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels: Language, Author and Context eds. by Julia Fernández Cuesta and Sara Pons-Sanz

Reviewed by: The Old English Gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels: Language, Author and Context eds. by Julia Fernández Cuesta and Sara Pons-Sanz Greg Waite Fernández Cuesta, Julia and Sara Pons-Sanz, eds, The Old English Gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels: Language, Author and Context ( Anglia Book Series, 51), Berlin, De Gruyter, 2016; cloth; pp. xii, 432, R.R.P. €99.95, US $140.00, £74.99; ISBN 9783110449105. This volume contains papers from a 2012 workshop on the Lindisfarne gloss held at the University of Westminster, with the addition of others. The aim is to gather different perspectives (palaeography, glossography, history, linguistics, and philology) to understand better 'the socio-historical context and the cultural and intellectual milieu in which [the gloss] was produced' (p. 1). The Old English (OE) continuous interlinear gloss inserted into the Lindisfarne Gospels by Aldred in the later tenth century, as an act of reverence and devotion, has long attracted the attention of historical linguists and those studying the book's cultural history. It provides key evidence for the Northumbrian dialect of OE, in an era when literary production was dominated by the West Saxon standardized written dialect exemplified in the works of Ælfric, Wulfstan, and others trained in the monastic reform era. In Part I, 'The Gloss in Context', five papers address wider cultural and historical issues. Michelle Brown further develops ideas advanced in her earlier study The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (British Library, 2003), arguing that Aldred's gloss must be understood against a background of Anglo-Scandinavian political relations, where it was necessary to assert 'Englishness' and Christian character in the North. Jane Roberts investigates Aldred's colophon, and its evidence for the Gospels' origin at Lindisfarne, [End Page 196] revisiting her hypothesis that a vernacular poem served as a source of evidence for Aldred's claims. She also considers points of comparison and contrast between Aldred's glosses to the Gospels, and the Durham Collectar. Philip Rusche's examination of Aldred's glossing indicates that he was influenced mainly by older traditions of Psalter glossing from the ninth century, rather than new developments in the period of monastic reform. Paul Cavill, on the other hand, finds that Aldred's marginalia appear to embody a reforming spirit and a desire for his monastic community to embrace material poverty and purity of heart. Stuart Brookes presents a survey of the varieties of letter-form in the gloss. Aldred's work betrays knowledge of both Square minuscule and Carolingian letter-forms, in addition to his principal script, a somewhat old-fashioned Insular minuscule, and his practice embodies a creative response to the script variety he encountered in the Latin text. Part II, 'The Language of the Gloss', begins with Robert McColl Millar's examination of noun phrase morphology simplification. This paper, along with some others, shows how developments found in early Middle English are already occurring in Northumbria, in contrast with southern OE dialects. Marcelle Cole's paper on present-tense verb morphology contributes to another important line of enquiry. Building on studies by Brunner, Blakeley, and others, she shows how the distribution of variant forms indicates that Aldred's work does not reflect a uniform idiolect throughout, and must have been based on earlier source materials. Luisa García García examines the use and morphological status of causative (-jan) verbs, concluding that the pace of change in inflectional morphology is not paralleled in derivational morphology. María Nieves Rodríguez Ledesma examines morphology and word order for genitive phrases, and George Walkden null subjects as evidence for syntactic variation. Julia Fernández Cuesta compares Skeat's edition with MS Cotton Nero D.iv, highlighting problems of using the print version for linguistic analysis. Part III, 'Glossing Practice', contains an analysis of multiple glosses to present tense forms of beon by Christine Bolze, and another by Sara Pons-Sanz on the principles of ordering of double or multiple semantic glosses. Patrizia Lendinara examines words left unglossed by Aldred, arguing that informed principles are at work here, rather than gaps in his knowledge. Karen Jolly brings her expert knowledge of the Durham Collectar to bear upon Aldred's work...

Book review: The Macregol Gospels or the Rushworth Gospels: Edition of the Latin Text with the Old English Interlinear Gloss Transcribed from Oxford Bodleian Library, ms Auctarium D. 2. 19, written by Kenichi Tamoto

Book review: The Macregol Gospels or the Rushworth Gospels: Edition of the Latin Text with the Old English Interlinear Gloss Transcribed from Oxford Bodleian Library, ms Auctarium D. 2. 19, written by Kenichi Tamoto

Commenting on Historical Writings in Medieval Latin Europe: A Reconnaissance

Modern scholarship seems to undervalue medieval commentaries on historical writings. This article intends to bring this phenomenon to scholars’ attention by providing a preliminary overview of the forms and subjects of such commentaries. It examines various types of evidence including not only a few commentaries proper (Nicolas Trevet’s on Livy and John of Dąbrówka’s on Vincent of Cracow), but also different apparatus consisting of more or less systematic interlinear and marginal glosses and commentary-like additions to vernacular translations, mostly of Italian and French origin. It begins by considering various consultation-related signs and annotations, such as cross-references. Then, it studies the text-like features of sets of glosses (ascertained authorship and manuscript tradition) and briefly discusses some of their patterns of display as found in single manuscripts. Turning to the contents of commentaries, the article first touches upon introductions to the authors (accessus) and comments on the historians’ lives and the history of their writings. The article then discusses comments on different levels of meaning: first, explanations of grammatical forms, figures of speech, semantics of single words and entire fragments, then, different ways of exploring, or imposing, the inner senses of historical narration, mostly of an ethical nature. Finally, the text argues that among the different ways of expounding an historical account, comments on subject matter are especially worthy of attention from the perspective of the history of historical scholarship. Explanations of technical terms and place names often led to erudite digressions and revealed tensions between continuity and change. Expounding historical contents of entire fragments might include some elements of source criticism or tend towards a new historical synthesis. Medieval commentators were also able to read historical information beyond the factual account, often introducing subjects proper to antiquarian writings.