9.1 Working with the MEC
The Middle English Compendium (MEC) was produced by the University of Michigan. The electronic version can be accessed free of charge at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/. It has three main parts. One is the Middle English Dictionary (MED). The printed version was completed in 2001 and had no fewer than 15,000 pages. The electronic version is even more ambitious. It is fully searchable and has links taking you to other parts of the Compendium.
The second part is called the HyperBibliography of Middle English. It is a list of all the materials used in compiling the dictionary, and is probably the most comprehensive collection of references to texts of the period available.
The third element is the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. This is a collection of texts. In 2014 the number was 62, and another 80 will be added in the future. The texts can be searched. So if you look up a particular word, you will be shown all examples of it found in the data, given with their surrounding textual context.
We will use the word leued as a way of exploring the resources of the Compendium. It makes an appearance in Activity 9C in the spelling lewde, and is associated with PDE ‘lewd’. Go onto the MEC website and click on ‘Middle English Dictionary’, then on ‘Lookups’. Put ‘leued’ into the box, and you will be sent to the word’s page. On its right-hand side near the top is some etymological information, telling you that the word comes from the OE lǣwede. The page gives you three main meanings, divided into ‘sub-meanings’, marked 1, 2 and 3. The first of these is ‘Uneducated, ignorant’, and (an interesting gloss on what was then regarded as ignorance) ‘unable to read Latin’. On the right-hand side beside each meaning it says: ‘Show quotations compact display’, and ‘show quotations open display”. The latter provides information slightly easier to read, so click on this for meaning 1, and you will be given several screenfuls of examples of the word in use. You may be amused by the sentiment in one example near the top: It sit a prest to be wel thewed, And schame it is if he be lewed (thewed means ‘behaved’, and lewed is a variant spelling for leued). Beside this, on the left, it gives the date of the quotation (1393) and the source: ‘Gower CA’. If you click on these words it will take you to the HyperBibliography where you will find full details of the source – the poet John Gower’s Confessio Amantis.
Because ME spelling was so open to variation, and because the Dictionary cannot list every form of the word, you sometimes have to search around for the word you are looking for. For example, go back to the Dictionary’s ‘Lookups’ page and put in the word thewed. You will find nothing. But if you change ‘Headword’ in the drop-down box to ‘Headword and forms’, you will find the verb (theuen) of which thewed is a part. There is also a very useful further facility to help you find words. This involves using an asterisk. Another word mentioned in Chapter 9 (9.2.3) is dispone. You will not find this under either ‘Headword’ or ‘Headword and forms’. Put in disp*. The asterisk means ‘plus something else’, so disp* will find all words beginning with ‘disp’ and with something following. One of the words on the list is disponen, and this is the verb you are after.
It is easier to find word variations in the Corpus. Go to the MEC’s home page and click on ‘Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse’, and then on ‘Simple Searches’. Put in lewed (the form of leued that was not coming up in the Dictionary). Just for fun, add the name Chaucer beside the words ‘Limit to’. This will give you all instances of the word in Chaucer’s works, each instance having a good quantity of surrounding text, so you can see the word in context.
There are many more fascinating things that can be done with the Compendium. It really is worth setting aside some time to explore it. As a start, use the ‘Lookups’ facility of the Dictionary to find out what the words below mean. Some are easy, some more difficult: you will sometimes have to use the ‘headwords and forms’ setting, and sometimes the asterisk:
| madden | percen | peren (noun, not verb) |
| dridnes | linnene (adj) |
9.2 How to recognise a French connection
There are some ‘rules of thumb’, though like all such rules, they will only help to a certain extent:
- French words tend to be polysyllabic – not always of course, but as a general rule. ‘Good old Anglo-Saxon words’ are often the short, monosyllabic ones.
- there are some suffixes, like : -able, -age, -ance, -acy, -ess, -ory, -aunce, -ician, -ize, -tion which suggest French origin. Care is needed, though, because (as we see in 9.2.1), once endings like these were accepted into the language, they ‘became English’ and started to attach themselves to words of non-French origin. Incidentally, you may like to think of some PDE words that carry each of the endings listed above. You could then, if you so wished, choose a few of them and, with the help of an etymological dictionary, see if they have French origins.
- there are some sound/letter sequences that are associated with French. oi and oy are examples, as in ME anoien, ‘to annoy’, bemoilen, ‘bespattered’, and ioie, ‘joy’. Look out too for what is often the AN version of CF oi. It is -ei, found in ME baleine, ‘whale’, atteinen, ‘to attain’, and chatelein, ‘castle governor’.
- Of course, the very best way of recognising French loans is if you can speak French! You will then easily spot words that have a French connection. Knowledge of any Romance language (2.3 discusses the word Romance) is likely to help, in fact. If you know that the Italian for ‘whale’ is balena, or that the Spanish is ballena, this will suggest to you that the French word is similar (it is in fact baleine), and that the ME word (also baleine is likely to come from a French source.
One of the difficulties with these ‘rules of thumb’ is that many words in French (and Norman French) themselves come from Latin. It is often difficult to know whether they came into English through the French or straight from Latin. Thus the NF baleine may be the source of the ME word given above, but both are clearly derived from the Latin balaena. Similarly, the OF ataindre is Latin attingere. Does the ME atteinen (and the PDE attain) come from Latin or French? Sometimes spelling hints will suggest one or other pathway, but often not.
9.3 Exploring word histories
It is amazing how far half an hour with the OED (or some other dictionary giving etymologies) will get you. To take a word at random from 9.2.1’s list of French-derived words in the ‘Chaunticleer passage’: the OED will tell you that the word certes comes from the Old French, which in turn is from the Latin expression a certis meaning ‘from certain grounds’. It also tells you that there is an Old Spanish certas and a Catalan certes. The first OED citation is from an Early ME poem that will be mentioned in Chapter 11 (11.1) – The Owl and the Nightingale. Often the word was pronounced with two syllables (cer-tes). The word is found in Shakespeare and (in 1815) in Wordsworth. Nowadays it is not used, and even Samuel Johnson, in the eighteen century, calls it ‘an old word’. But we do have a slang expression in British English (also listed in the OED) – a dead cert. It refers to something that is certain, and is particularly used in horse racing, where a horse might be described as a ‘dead cert’ to win a race. If you are in a clicking mood, you can use the box on the right of the OED screen (for the word certes)to explore some similar words. You might wonder how PDE ‘certificate’ and even ‘certifiable’ is associated with ‘certain’ and other ‘cert-based’ words. And not just half an hour, but the afternoon will be soon gone . . .