A collection of
glosses, thus copied out and thrown together into a single list,
constituted a _Glossarium_ or _Glossary_; it was the remote precursor
of the seventeenth-century 'Table Alphabetical,' or 'Expositor of Hard
Words.'
Such was one of the fountain-heads of English lexicography; the other
is to be found in the fact that in those distant days, as in our own,
the learning of Latin was the acquisition of a foreign tongue which
involved the learning of a grammar and of a vocabulary. Both grammar
and vocables were probably in the main communicated by oral teaching,
by the living voice of the master, and were handed down by oral
tradition from generation to generation. The stock of vocables was
acquired by committing to memory classified lists of words; lists of
names of parts of the body, lists of the names of domestic animals, of
wild beasts, of fishes, of trees, of heavenly bodies, of geographical
features, of names of relationship and kindred, of ranks and orders of
men, of names of trades, of tools, of arms, of articles of clothing,
of church furniture, of diseases, of virtues and vices, and so on.
Such lists of vocables, with their meaning in the vulgar tongue, were
also at times committed to paper or parchment leaves, and a collection
of these constituted a _Vocabularium_ or _Vocabulary_.
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