ABSTRACT
Some five nominalia containing Anglo-French nouns have now been published, besides two treatises designed chiefly to teach Anglo-French vocabulary.16 The earliest nominalia are lists of Latin nouns, glossed in French;17 but their French-English counterparts are arranged in a closely similar manner. The words are gathered in groups according to subject-matter - parts of the body, clothing, household utensils, animals, birds, fish, trees, and so forth - but none of the French-English texts is sufficiently close to any other in precise wordorder, or even in the vocabulary used, to establish a pedigree or an identifiable pedagogic tradition. Certainly there are identifiable interrelationships. For instance, in the present vocabulary there are at least two groups of words which are almost certainly derived directly or indirectly from Bibbesworth. This can be demonstrated by a curious mistake in our text. The rhyming trio fylaundre, chalaundre, salamandre is here placed under ‘Names of Birds’, although in Bibbesworth (and also in Femina, where the same trio occurs) salamandre is correctly translated ‘cricket’, having been inserted purely for the rhyme: but our scribe became confused, and mistook it as another word for a woodlark. A similar error occurs with the pair loutre and glaue, which occurs in two manuscripts of Bibbesworth in a passage describing dirt in the ear: but our scribe seems to have taken loutre to be some unidentified species of creepycrawly. If these words betray the influence of Bibbesworth, the list of parts of the body is by contrast much closer to the fourteenth-century Nominale which Professor Skeat published from Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.1v .20.
