Borrowed finery: issues of language classification in the lexis of cloth and clothing in Britain c700-1450 project

Conference item

In 2006 work began on the AHRC-funded project the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c700-1450 at the universities of Manchester and Westminster. Our aim is to collect the terms for garments, textiles, and processes of production and trade across all the languages in use in medieval Britain. All the items collected from dictionaries and scholarly work in the field are being entered into a web-held database which will be illustrated with citations, images, and references to archaeological and other scholarship. In this paper we discuss the question of language assignment that arises from the preparation of a multilingual lexicographical resource.

In a forthcoming article David Trotter examines lexical choices in the customs accounts for Southampton for 1435-36. Noting the wide variety of lexical items apparently from languages other than the matrix language (Anglo-Norman), he questions which languages certain lexical items should be assigned to. The account calls, for example, for 'M does de grey' for a John Medicus. Grey is the common Middle English designation for the fur of European grey squirrels (MED, grei, n.2), but what are we to make of dos? Foster proposes that dos is an Italian borrowing citing Italian-looking terms in the account, e.g. cotingnato, sporta, and fangotto. Trotter contests this designation observing that an indisputable 'French' form dos appears in the same sense in the (French) Livre des mestiers (c1268).

As this example indicates, we are frequently confronted with terms which appear to be replicated across disparate linguistic communities. Research on the multilingual situation of Britain in the late medieval period has started to suggest that assigning lexical items, in particular those found in macaronic texts, to particular languages is at best anachronistic. We need, it seems, to find new ways of thinking about, and classifying, the vocabulary that we are collecting.

Authors: Sylvester, L; Zumbuhl, M

• Alternative title: Presented at Historical Vocabulary session
• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Language: English
• Keywords: textiles; garments; processes of production
• Subjects: Lexicography