ABSTRACT
Old and Middle English plant names continue to attract the attention of linguists and language-historians. A large collection of OE plant names was assembled by Bierbaumer 1975-1979 and an extensive corpus of M E plant names by Hunt 1989; a comprehensive linguistic analysis of the entire material has yet to be carried out, however. Parts of the material were analysed somewhat closer by d’Aronco 1988, Norri 1988, Sauer 1992b and Wallner 1992, for example; detailed analyses of single plant names include those of Kitson 1988 and Biggam 1994. Whereas Juhani Norri takes a look at 15th century plant name material in the present volume (pp. 159ff), I shall here analyse some material from the 13th century, in particular the trilingual Harley Vocabulary, and I shall mainly deal with questions of etymology, morphology and semantics.
