‘ “Their harmless calling”: Stokes and the Irish linguistic tradition’, in Elizabeth Boyle and Paul Russell (eds), The Tripartite Life of Whitley Stokes (1830–1909) (Dublin: Four Courts, 2011), pp 175–84 (original) (raw)
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Peritia, 2018
Manuscript 1247 of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library) in Vienna is a parchment codex of 160 folios which contains the epistles of St Paul in beautifully executed letters. The codex is an autograph of Marianus Scottus alias Muiredach mac Robartaig who wrote it in the course of the year 1079, as the colophon at the end of the manuscript reveals (gloss 5). Marianus Scottus, hailing from the area of modern Donegal, was the founder of the Benedictine Schottenkloster in Regensburg/Ratisbon (Bavaria, Germany); he is even credited with the initiation of the South-German tradition of Schottenklöster as a whole (Ó Clabaigh 2005: 405). Marianus died in 1081, not long after the completion of the manuscript that is the subject of the present article. A vita written around a century after his death contains information about his life . The Marianus Scottus from Regensburg must not be confused with his Latin namesake, the exactly contemporary chronicler Marianus Scottus alias Máel Brigte from Mainz, originally also from the north of Ireland, who died in 1082.
International Journal of Lexicography, 2020
Liddell and Scott has long been regarded as one of the most valuable pieces of Ancient Greek lexicography. Following its creation in the mid-19th century, this renowned lexicon by two young Oxford postgraduates has undergone a myriad of revisions and incorporated multiple addenda along the way. As recently as 2019, Christopher Stray, Michael Clarke, and Joshua T. Katz edited the compilation of twenty-one articles which I have been commissioned to review here. These articles are, in turn, grouped around the following parts or overarching themes: (1) History and Constitution of the Lexicon; (2) Periods and Genres of Evidence; (3) Methodology and Problems; and (4) Comparisons in Time and Space. Throughout the compilation, contributors pay their particular homage to Liddell and Scott by primarily focusing on the path travelled up to its ninth edition (henceforth referred to as LSJ). Heterogenous, yet inclusive insights are adopted which highlight Liddell and Scott’s strengths and shortcomings alike, with the latter having mostly to do with updates perceived as necessary in the twenty-first century. It might well be this willingness of the Lexicon to embrace change that underlies its long-lived success. Lexica of ancient languages have oftentimes been wrongfully regarded as static quasi-archaeological remnants, based on their tendency to depict a fossilized, no-longer-in-use model of language. However, since the baseline goal of a dictionary is that of making the language that pertains to a particular historical context accessible to a reader, both types of ancient- or modern-language lexica demonstrate a legitimate need for ongoing revisions and constant updates. Even though the corpus of entries in Liddell and Scott has remained largely unaltered through the years, a refinement in the teaching methodologies and a deeper understanding of Ancient Greece have both come a long way since the conception of the Lexicon. This shift in focus correlates with a strong willingness to explore the Greek Antiquity through language and the usage thereof in a variety of literary works, which certainly requires taking on a multidimensional approach. Until recently, the study of Greek would adopt a merely stative stance. Students and scholars alike were expected to acquire the ‘fossilised’ fundamentals of language history and grammatical structure. It is within this context that the lexica became essential tools in verifying (even ‘deciphering’) the meaning of units largely unknown to the community of students and researchers. This process was basically conducted in a mechanical manner, from a lack of criticism or further interest therein. Among the multiple shifts undergone by society since the mid-1800s, gradual emphasis has arisen on complexity, diversity, and (relatedly) critical thinking. As I will review in the following section, this 2019 volume by Stray et al. (eds) vividly demonstrates the fate of this shift in mentality. Its articles, as a whole, embrace a broad spectrum of scholarly concerns, both methodological and societal.
2023
Norman, and, more recently, Anglo-French. In what follows, also for reasons of simplicity, the term French will be used throughout. In the twelfth century the Latin compilations to which Hunt (1991: I, 23, 76, 204) as well as Hüllen (1999: 81) refer to as 'wordbooks' began to appear. Works such as the Oratio de utensilibus of Adam of Petit Pont or De nominibus utensilium of Alexander Neckam, not to speak of part of the large production by John of Garland, may be described as contextualized wordlists. They serve to teach Latin vocabulary and are extensively glossed in French, and, to a minor degree, in English and Latin. Only a few glossaries were compiled before 1300: some are less known but quite interesting because of their contents. AElfric's Glossary was copied and updated and all-Latin glossaries, which were in circulation in Anglo-Saxon England, were excerpted and re-used as well (see below). A version of AElfric's Glossary, updated by the so-called 'Tremulous Hand of Worcester', is preserved in Worcester, CCL, MS F. 174 (s. xiii 1). The activity of this scribe spanned a considerable number of years, well into the first half of the thirteenth century. His hand has been identified in about twenty manuscripts of the Cathedral Library of Worcester, which are annotated and glossed throughout. One feature of this extended endeavour is of interest here, as according to Franzen (1991: 119), the 'Tremulous Hand' intended to compile a large alphabetical glossary. This aim is witnessed by various worksheets, discovered in a few manuscripts and written in his hand, where English-Latin (and Latin-English) word pairs drawn from his glosses were transcribed. The worksheet on fol. iii of Oxford, Bdl, MS Junius 121 lists nine items in alphabetical order (drawn from the Old English translation of Gregory's Dialogues in London, BL, MS Cotton Otho C I). 2 Glossaries The glossary in London, BL, MS Stowe 57 (s. xii 2) shows a peculiar distribution of the glosses added interlinearly to the text, which is not fully explained in the descriptions in circulation (beginning with Garrett 1908). 3 The codex includes a Libellus de nominibus naturalium rerum on fols 155v-165r, an otherwise unrecorded compilation drawn from Isidore's Etymologies (XII. i-v, vii-viii, vi, etc.). The compiler, after a brief introduction (repeating the words of Isidore), lists a number of Latin words, copying two or three of them in each line, with a wide space around. The list includes the headword of the Isidorian subchapters, at first with a different order, but afterwards following the order in the Etymologies. A smaller hand in a different ink added some glosses in French and several in English. Longer additions supply snippets of the Etymologies accompanied by medical remarks. The glosses are written beside some of the Latin lemmata or in the bottom line next to them. The headings listed by Hunt (1991) are those of Isidore's encyclopaedia and not those of a class glossary. However, the vernacular glosses might have been drawn from a compilation of that kind. Cambridge, TC, MS O. 3. 37 (s. xii) contains, on 198v-202r, an alphabetical glossary of more than 800 entries in four columns per page. The entries, listed alphabetically in a-order, are mainly in Latin. They originate from different sources but more than one hundred go back to Book III of the
Gnomon 94, 2022
The history of what is today generally referred to simply as LSJ-the ninth edition of Oxford University Press' 'Greek-English Lexicon', «compiled by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott. Revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones, with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie and with the cooperation of many scholars», with a pair of supplements dating to 1968 and 1996-begins in the mid-1830s, when two recent Oxford graduates, the eponymous Liddell and Scott, were commissioned by the Press to produce what was originally in large part a translation of Franz Passow's slightly earlier Greek-German 'Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache' (4 th ed. 1830). The idea was not a new one; the Press had previously extended similar invitations to other young Oxford men, although with no substantial results. Liddell (who eventually became Dean of Christ Church and served for a period as Vice-Chancellor of the University) and Scott (whose interests tended more to theology, and who ultimately served as Dean of Rochester Cathedral), by contrast, combined their energies to rapidly produce, beginning in 1843, a long series of editions of what remains, almost two centuries later, an essential tool for serious work on the ancient Greek language. In the meantime, Liddell fathered ten children, one of them the Alice who gave her name to the central character in Charles Dodgson's (= Lewis Carroll's) 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' (1865) and 'Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There' (1871).