Conference item
The Vocabularium Cornicum: a Cornish vocabulary?
- Alternative title:
- Presented at Celtic/Scots Lexicography session
- Abstract:
- The Vocabularium Cornicum is thought to date from around 1100 AD. It is apparently based on the earlier "English-Latin Lexicon" (ELL) of Aelfric, Abbot of Eynsham (c.955-c.1010). The manuscript was for some time classified as Welsh since it appeared by the Latin title Vocabularium Wallicum. Lhuyd (1707: 222) identified the vocabulary as Cornish not Welsh. Lhuyd (1707: 222) did so, on the basis that certain words in the vocabulary "are not known among us Welshmen" but are found in Cornish. Since Lhuyd's (1707) re-designation, the Vocabularium Cornicum has been widely held to be a Cornish vocabulary. However, the Vocabularium Cornicum contains not only Cornish translation equivalents of its Latin headwords. There are several examples where the translation equivalent is given in both Cornish and Welsh. In one case, only the Welsh is given. Many of the translation equivalents could equally well be either Cornish or Welsh, since these two languages were fairly similar at this period. There are also many English words that are not attested in later Cornish and thus cannot be assumed to have been borrowed and assimilated into Cornish. So, not all the translation equivalents in the Vocabularium Cornicum are Cornish and the Vocabularium Cornicum is thus a multilingual not a bilingual vocabulary. One possibility is that the vocabulary is a collection of glosses from various manuscripts and was not necessarily intended to include only a single target language. The compiler or compilers collected glosses in the vernacular for the Latin headwords but not for a specific target vernacular. The Vocabularium Cornicum was thus intended for a multilingual community of users.
- Publication status:
- Not published
- Peer review status:
- Reviewed (other)
Actions
Authors
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Subjects:
- UUID:
-
uuid:479f80db-d8f3-4a5e-ae64-06f8cf9b65d1
- Local pid:
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ora:4981
- Deposit date:
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2011-02-16
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Mills, J
- Copyright date:
- 2010
- Notes:
- This conference paper is not available in ORA.
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