Multilingual glossing and translanguaging in John of Garland’s Dictionarius: The case of Bruges, Public Library, MS 536

Abstract

Based on an edition of the multilingual glosses, this paper investigates a copy of John of Garland’s Dictionarius extant in Bruges, Public Library, MS 536. This copy, written around AD 1300, perhaps in the vicinity of Bruges, includes some 800 interlinear glosses in Latin, Middle French and Middle English. The glosses target the lexicon and also basic Latin grammar. The linguistic characteristics of the glosses indicate that at least some of the glossators were competent in French as well as in English. Many of the lexemes of the French glosses are attested as loanwords in early Middle English; moreover, there are at least 30 instances of double glosses with French and English. As such, we argue that the glossators used “translanguaging” as a didactic strategy, and that the manuscript may have been created, for instance, for English students planning to study in Paris.

Keywords

• multilingualism
• translanguaging
• glosses
• medieval manuscripts
• John of Garland
• Bruges Public Library MS 536