Robert Lloyd - a Sir Gar Blog of random news . . . and some Clecs!

The language of William the Conqueror has received a major boost with the announcement of a further Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary based at Aberystwyth University. A form of French brought to Britain following the defeat of the Anglo-Saxon King Harold in 1066, Anglo-Norman was widely used in Britain until the end of the fifteenth century – the late Middle Ages. Such was its influence, more than 50% of English words in use today are derived from Anglo-Norman. Amongst the many culinary English words used today that have an Anglo-Norman origin are ‘soup’, ‘lettuce’, ‘pheasant’, ‘pastry’, ‘ginger’, ‘sauce’, ‘chestnut’ and ‘mustard’. In its heyday it was widely used as a language of literature, trade, law, education and administration, well before Middle English emerged in the thirteenth century. Documents such as the Magna Carta and the laws of William the Conqueror, originally composed in Latin, were translated into Anglo-Norman, and medieval...

The Anglo-Norman Dictionary project (AND), since 2001 directed by Professor David Trotter and based in the Department of European Languages, Aberystwyth University, has been awarded the Prix Honoré Chavée by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris. The AND started life in 1947 when a “glossary committee” met in Oxford, to discuss the compilation of a dictionary (or at that stage, a glossary) of Anglo-Norman, the form of French in use in Britain as a result of the Norman Conquest in 1066. At first a spoken language, later increasingly used in writing alone, Anglo-Norman was extant from 1066 until the mid-15th-century, lingering on in legal language, and leaving a lasting impact on English especially in vocabulary. The AND set out, more than 60 years ago, to record this language and was thus also the beginning of a attempt to document the entirety of its usage, and the words it was made up of. Initially, the AND was very “literary” in its coverage, but towards the mid-19...