ABSTRACT
Awareness of vernacular languages as the legitimate object of study emerged slowly from the shadow of Latin. Although Ælfric's Colloquy had translated into Old English, the grammar it presented was that of Latin. Late thirteenth and early fourteenth-century Anglo-French vocabularies such as that of Walter of Bibbesworth served the practical purpose of teaching French to native English speakers. French, indeed, the route by which earlier medieval Englishmen arrived at knowledge of Latin. The Preface to a Wycliffite Biblical Concordance arises from the focus given to the study of English by the Wycliffite project of biblical translation. Passage is part of an account of the basic curriculum of the medieval England university, but has peculiar descriptive features which drawn from the person introspection of a speaker of English. Fifteenth-Century Text on Phonetics merely mentions the parts of speech and prosody, and confines itself to the lowest level of medieval grammatical analysis, sounds and letters.
