![]() ![]() In class, the students translated fragments of texts and gave presentations on literary and cultural topics. ![]() Students prepared by studying the Old English grammar and the contributions to the Cambridge Companion. Lapidge and Godden, 2013) for essential background reading. The course books were Bruce Mitchell and Fred Robinson’s Guide to Old English (2011) for grammar and texts and the Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature (eds. The module offered two seminars of two hours per week. In the last two years I have integrated Evoke in a seven-week module titled “Language and Culture of Anglo-Saxon England”, for second- and third-year BA Students of English Language and Culture, at the University of Groningen. 22% describe sea or ocean in terms of region or area 4% touch on its remoteness 10 % denote an open, deep sea, while 6 % talk about sea in terms of a channel (see Figure 1).Ģ Introducing Evoke in the Old English Classroom Among the subordinate concepts, 27% of these lexemes evoke the meaning of ‘wave’, while another 21% concern the surging, rolling or heaving of the waves. Evoke reveals that within the TOE category “01.01.03.01.02 sea/ocean”, there are no fewer than 177 Old English lexemes, 85% of them nouns. How many lexemes for ‘sea’ are there in Old English, and how should they be semantically arranged? For this kind of question, the data from A Thesaurus of Old English ( TOE) viewed through the lense of Evoke are vital. 468b–469a), 3 will recognise the potential of investigating the vocabulary concerning the sea in the light of these texts. Codoñer, 1992), show the importance which was attached to the sometimes minute distinctions between terms for similar concepts.Īnyone who is teaching Old English nowadays and whose curriculum includes, of course the Seafarer, or Andreas, or Beowulf, or even Exodus, in which, after the Egyptian Faraoh has entered the Red Sea, “holmweall astah, merestream modig” (ll. Early medieval commentaries on synonymy, such as Isidore of Seville’s De differentiis verborum (ed. 2 The lexemes for ‘sea’ on both sides of the linguistic divide give us important information about how such an omnipresent concept as the sea or ocean was worded by the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, what distinctions they made, what images they may have used to depict the sea in words. spear-man’, a compound of uncertain etymology. Old English sæ is mare or aequor in Latin, but pelagus is the Latin word for Old English widsæ ‘open sea, ocean’ Latin oceanum is rendered in Old English as garsecg ‘lit. Very appropriately, ‘the sea’ is the next concept. In Ælfric’s Glossarium, which follows the Grammatica in some of the manuscripts, the complexities of both the Latin and the Old English lexicon become clear: Old English eorðe is known as tellus or terra (the same example as in the Grammatica), but molde ‘the ground’ is humus (ed. The earliest examples of such schoolbooks are the so-called Hermeneumata pseudo-Dositheana (Lendinara, 1999: 9–11 Dionisotti, 1982: 91). The use of class glossaries reached back to the genre of hermeneumata: combinations of alphabetical glossaries, class glossaries and small conversational texts known as colloquies, found as appendices to grammars during the late classical period to help pupils who spoke Latin to learn Greek. ![]() For, as Ælfric describes in his Grammatica – a grammar of Latin written in Old English – in the section on nouns: “some are sinonima, these are plurivoca they mean a single thing with multiple appellations, just as ensis is sword, gladius is sword and mucro is sword terra is earth and tellus is earth.” 1 The importance of synonyms was known to the Anglo-Saxons, whose educational system involved class glossaries (also known as topical glossaries), which listed together terms from a specific topical field. If Ælfric of Eynsham had designed the digital platform Evoke (Stolk, 2018) a little more than a thousand years ago, he might have called it Plurivoke. ![]()
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