The other is a short vocabulary of the Latin and
vernacular names of plants, a species of class-vocabulary of which
there exist several of rather early date.
But when we reach the end of the fourteenth century, English is once
more in the ascendant. Robert of Gloucester, Robert Mannyng of Brunne,
Dan Michel of Canterbury, and Richard Rolle of Hampole, William
Langland and John Wyclif, John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, and many
other authors of less known or entirely unknown name, have written in
the tongue of the people; English has been sanctioned for use in the
courts of law; and, as John of Trevisa tells us, has, since the
'furste moreyn' or Great Pestilence of 1349 (which Mrs. Markham has
taught nineteenth-century historians to call the 'Black Death'), been
introduced into the grammar schools in the translation of Latin
exercises, which boys formerly rendered into French. And under these
new conditions lexicographical activity at once bursts forth with
vigour. Six important vocabularies of the fifteenth century are
printed by Wright-Wuelcker, most of them arranged, like the Old English
one of AElfric, under subject-headings; but one large one, extending to
2,500 words, entirely alphabetical.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25