C.T. Onions on English etymology : langues et œuvres

(photo ©️, online)

Je lis les Front matter du Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, conçu par CT Onions après son travail pour l’OED (date ? La parution est annoncée à 1966, mais celle de qui ?). Avec en mémoire le texte fondamental d’Onions qui m’avait fait découvrir la ressource de la lexicographie, Bodliean library, some Oxford summer – quel texte mère ? Sans doute une préface au grand OED classique.

Ici donc, on présente quelques conventions de présentation des items, puis la liste des abréviations, où je retrouve le mélange aimé, l’espace continu, des langues et des œuvres. Quelque chose que la lexicographie sait de près, singulièrement. Sait ne pas pouvoir faire sans. Connaît cette source unie, unique, des textes et des lettres. Sans évoquer une évidence plus radicale encore : les langues et la diversité des langues dans toute langue.

Par contre les œuvres ici, c’est là que je découvre, des zones lexicologiques que je ne fais que deviner sans ces connaissances à eux :

• de la bible : Authorized Version, Vulgate, Septuagint (LXX), Lydgate, New Testament,
• ‘Catholicon Anglicum’, inconnu au bataillon : “English-Latin wordbook, 1483“. [Catholicon ici = universel].
• ‘Cursor Mundi’ : The Cursor Mundi (or ‘Over-runner of the World’) is an early 14th-century religious poem written in Northumbrian Middle English that presents an extensive retelling of the history of Christianity from the creation to the doomsday. The poem is long, composed of almost 30,000 lines, but shows considerable artistic skill. In spite of the immense mass of material with which it deals, it is well proportioned, and the narrative is lucid and easy.The Cursor Mundi is more or less completely unknown outside of medievalist and lexicographical circles. Yet, the poem is one of the texts that provides the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) with over 1,000 new words, i.e. words that were unknown before they appeared for the first time in the Cursor Mundi. The poem has also provided over 11,000 quotations for the published Dictionary, making it the second most heavily quoted work in OED1/2 after the Bible and the fifth most quoted source altogether
• Peterborough Chronicle: The Peterborough Chronicle (also called the Laud manuscript and the E manuscript) is a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles originally maintained by the monks of Peterborough Abbey, now in Cambridgeshire. It contains unique information about the history of England and of the English language after the Norman Conquest; according to philologist J. A. W. Bennett, it is the only prose history in English between the Conquest and the later 14th century. – Today, the Peterborough Chronicle is recognised as one of the four distinct versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (along with the Winchester Chronicleor Parker Chronicle, the Abingdon Chronicle and the Worcester Chronicle), but it is not wholly distinct. Donated by Laud to Bodliean.
• Paradise Lost, Piers Plowman,
• ‘Promptorium Parvulorum’ (really?? : The Promptorium parvulorum (Latin: “Storehouse for children”) is an English-Latin bilingual dictionarythat was completed about 1440 AD. It was the first English-to-Latin dictionary.^[1] It occupies about 300 printed book pages.^[2] Its authorship is attributed to Geoffrey the Grammarian, a friar who lived in Lynn, Norfolk, England.), ‘South English Legendary’,
• Maundeville : The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, commonly known as Mandeville’s Travels, is a book written between 1357 and 1371 that purports to be the travel memoir of an Englishman named Sir John Mandeville across the Islamic world as far as India and China. The earliest-surviving text is in French, followed by translations into many other languages; the work acquired extraordinary popularity. Despite the extremely unreliable and often fantastical nature of the travels it describes, it was used as a work of reference: Christopher Columbus, for example, was heavily influenced by both this work and Marco Polo’s earlier Travels.
• Palsgrave: He composed L’esclarcissement de la langue francoyse (printed in 1530 in London and dedicated to Henry VIII). The book, written in English despite its French title, is said to be the first grammar of the French language. Its purpose was to help Englishmen who wanted to learn French. – After studying at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, B.A. 1504,^[1] he travelled to France to study in Paris where he qualified as M.A. He became tutor to Princess Mary Tudor in 1513, receiving the sum of £6-13s-4d per annum. When she married Louis XII of France, he accompanied her to Paris, but by 1516 he had moved to Louvain;^[2] Sir Thomas More wrote to Erasmus to recommend him to study law and classics there. – Renaissance Linguist: A Pioneer in Vernacular Language Description
• Shakespeare,
• Prudentius: Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (/pruːˈdɛnʃiəs, –ʃəs/) was a Roman Christian poet, born in the Roman province of Tarraconensis (now Northern Spain) in 348. – The allegorical Psychomachia, however, is his most influential work, incorporating as it did elements of both Hellenic epic and inner psychological conflict.^[3] It became the inspiration and wellspring of medieval allegorical literature, its influence (according to C. S. Lewis) exceeding its intrinsic artistic merit.^[4] In the battle between virtue and vice, full weight is given to the power of Luxuria, she succeeds in swaying the army of Virtue “in surrender to love”,^[6] before succumbing to ultimate defeat. – Influence : With his merger of Christianity with classical culture,^[7] Prudentius was one of the most popular medieval authors,^[8] being aligned as late as the 13th century alongside such figures as Horace and Statius in Henri d’Andeli’s Battle of the Seven Arts between Grammar (poetry) and Logic.
• Robert de Gloucester: wrote a chronicle of British, English and Norman history sometime in the mid- or late thirteenth century.
• similar to the South English Legendary (probably first composed c. 1270–85), and between them they comprise ‘two huge monuments of later thirteenth-century literary activity’ in England
• Wycliffe: John Wycliffe (c. 1328 – 31 December 1384) was an English scholastic philosopher, theologian, biblical translator, reformer, Catholic priest, and a seminary professor at the University of Oxford. He became an influential dissident within the Catholic priesthood during the 14th century and is considered an important predecessor to Protestantism. Wycliffe questioned the privileged status of the clergy, who had bolstered their powerful role in England, and advocated radical poverty of the clergy.  – Wycliffe has been characterised as the “evening star” of scholasticism and as the morning star or stellamatutina of the English Reformation. – translation direct from the Vulgate into Middle English – a version now known as Wycliffe’s Bible.
• et la compagnie des lexicographes et étymologistes : Ernout et Meillet, Gamillscheg, Dr Johnson!, Meyer-Lübke, Notes and Queries j’imagine (?), B. Sandahl

and no other??. Corpus constitué. Quelle est sa physionomie ?