THE CATHOLICON ANGLICUM ( 1483 ) : A RECONSIDERATION

Introductory comments Within the history of English lexicography, bilingual word lists with the language order Latin-English precede those with the order EnglishLatin. Stein (1985) compared the two earliest English-Latin dictionaries, the Promptorium parvulorum (1440) and the Catholicon Anglicum (1483) and suggested that the overall organization of the Catholicon Anglicum seems to be more geared towards the encoding language needs of the 15thcentury English person learning Latin than was the case with the Promptorium parvulorum. In the present article, this suggestion is taken up and developed further by looking at the Catholicon Anglicum from learners' point of view. It is shown that the compiler's strategies to meet the learners' needs interestingly anticipate the pedagogical and lexicographical methods that became commonplace in learners' dictionaries only several centuries later.


Introductory comments
Within the history of English lexicography, bilingual word lists with the language order Latin-English precede those with the order English-Latin.Stein (1985) compared the two earliest English-Latin dictionaries, the Promptorium parvulorum (1440) and the Catholicon Anglicum (1483) and suggested that the overall organization of the Catholicon Anglicum seems to be more geared towards the encoding language needs of the 15thcentury English person learning Latin than was the case with the Promptorium parvulorum.In the present article, this suggestion is taken up and developed further by looking at the Catholicon Anglicum from learners' point of view.It is shown that the compiler's strategies to meet the learners' needs interestingly anticipate the pedagogical and lexicographical methods that became commonplace in learners' dictionaries only several centuries later.
In The English Dictionary before Cawdrey (1985), I compared the first Latin-English dictionaries, the Medulla grammatice and the Ortus vocabulorum, and the first English-Latin dictionaries, the Promptorium parvulorum and the Catholicon Anglicum.Within the history of English lexicography, bilingual word lists with the language order Latin-English precede those with the order English-Latin.The sources of these types of dictionaries are the great Latin dictionaries of the Middle Ages as well as the works of classical Latin authors.Compilers of early Latin-English dictionaries could therefore put their headword list together by selecting Latin entry 110 Nordic Journal of English Studies words from the various sources consulted and then supply English translation equivalents for them.This is what they did, and when an English equivalent was not known or at hand, the space was simply left empty.
For compilers of early English-Latin dictionaries, the lexicographical task was more difficult.They had to compile an English headword list and had to decide which English spelling to choose for the lemma (obviously, more of a problem than where the English form merely glossed a Latin word).They might, of course, have turned around Latin-English word lists, making the English equivalent the headword and the Latin lemma the corresponding translation equivalent.That this was one of the lexicographical working practices becomes manifest from a close study of early bilingual dictionaries matching Latin and English.
Comparing the two earliest English-Latin dictionaries and trying to establish the lexicographical methods used by their compilers, I suggested in 1985 that the overall organization of the Catholicon Anglicum seems to be more geared towards the encoding language needs of the 15th-century Assuming that medieval Latin dictionaries and inverted Latin-English word lists constituted the working bases for 15th-century compilers of English-Latin dictionaries, their first task will have been to select from this rich word stock those lexical items that were to be included in their respective dictionaries.The respective compilers of the Promptorium parvulorum and the Catholicon Anglicum acquitted themselves well and in similar ways.They opted to exclude material that was regarded as too encyclopedic in nature, and thus only a few proper names appear in their dictionaries (cf.Stein 1985: 96-7;110).They also excluded specialized vocabulary.Lexical coverage in the first English-Latin dictionaries was thus much smaller than in the Latin-English dictionaries: Huntsman's edition of the Medulla grammatice has nearly 17,000 entries (Huntsman 1973: xxviii), whereas the Promptorium parvulorum has about 12,000 and the Catholicon Anglicum one third less, about 8,000 (Stein 1985:110).
The next major task was to determine the order in which the headwords were to be arranged.It is here that the compiler of the Promptorium to make Softe; mollificare, mollire, de-, e-, mollitare.
In a Latin-English word list, alphabetical order would have linked the items molis (mollis), mollere, mollescere, mollicia, mollicies, molliculus, mollire, mollitare, etc.By changing the language order, the English translation equivalents soft, to make soft, to he soft, softness would have come to be headwords.The compiler then decided to leave the word family together, not entering to make soft under m, and to he soft under b as the Lynn friar might have done.Yet the compiler of the Catholicon Anglicum also assembled word family entries independently from a pre-given Latin alphabetical list, as can be shown with the lexical entries based on the verb to eat: to Ete; epulari, con-, comedere, comessare, vessi, con-, edere, conex-, fagin grece, mandare, manducare, papare, prendere, pransare, pransitare.
Clear proof that the compiler was concerned with observing word families in the headword structure of the Catholicon Anglicum as a lexicographical principle comes from his policy of providing antonyms for verbs and adjectives, e.g.: to Close; vallare, sepire, circum-, ob-.
As we can see from the examples to vn Close and vn Frendly capitalization has been given the role of highlighting the lexical basis of the word family.Ordinarily, the use of capitals in early word lists was mainly to signal the beginning of a new line.In the Catholicon Anglicum it identifies the headword lexeme and thus even penetrates the word level when the word is a complex one, such as a prefixal derivative.
The examples quoted show another distinctive feature of the Catholicon Anglicum: English nouns are preceded by a determiner and verbs are listed with the particle to.In this case, too, it may have been the inversion of Latin-English word lists to English-Latin ones that prompted the compiler to give such "prelemmatic" items (cf.Stein 1997: 197).It was quite common practice in Latin-English word lists to render Latin nouns, whether or not preceded by a gender-indicating demonstrative (hie, hec, hoc), by an English translation equivalent, specifying at the same time the grammatical class (a for countable nouns, a zero article for uncountable nouns, and the for nouns of unique reference).And verbs were preceded by the particle to to signal infinitive status.The compiler of the Catholicon Anglicum obviously decided to carry these grammatical features over into his English headword list.One may wonder why English native learners of Latin should be told that verbs in their mother tongue were preceded by to, or that nouns had to be used with a specific kind of determiner.
There is no way of knowing whether the compiler may have meant to further his users' grammatical education in the mother tongue.Yet what is manifest from the compiler's decision is that in retaining the prelemmatic features he achieves a clear grammatical differentiation of homonyms.
The searching eyes of the dictionary users would have been able to identify the lexical item they were looking for at a single quick glance.
It thus looks as if the compiler of the Catholicon Anglicum by means of prelemmatic grammatical elements and by capitalization of the headwords proper increased their accessibility for the dictionary users.And in linking this with a word-family organization he supplied his learners with the necessary linguistic items allowing rephrasing in a different form, thus helping the learners to express themselves in Latin.A further indication of the compiler's concern to enable his dictionary users to find what they are looking for is the cross-reference system in the Catholicon Anglicum, co-referring spelling variants and synonyms.
I turn now to the foreign language component of the dictionary to look into what the compiler singled out from the rich description of Latin found in his source material.

Worlds of Words -A tribute to Arne Zettersten 115
In cases where a Latin vowel is contracted or should not be contracted, attention is drawn to the correct pronunciation: vn Lyke; dissimilis, insimilis, dispar correpto -a-, separ omnis generis, correpto A in obliquis.
For nouns grammatical gender as well as the genitive form is given, for adjectives the masculine, feminine and neuter form is provided, e.g.: An Abbacy; hec Abbacia e.
The compiler is quite aware that with nouns referring to a person gender in English is covert and he therefore supplies the forms for the male and female in Latin, e.g.: a Diffamer; diffamator, -trix.
The semantic discrimination of Latin synonyms may also include mnemonic verses.These may be more personal in style, including pronouns of the first or second person, thus addressing or involving the dictionary learner, e.g.: to Drynke; bibere, con-, potare, con- (3) Locative derivatives for nouns, specifying where the referent of the noun is found: a Crekethole; grillarium, grilletum est locus vbi habundant.
(4) Words relating to ill-health may be followed by a derivative referring to someone who is a sufferer e.g.: be Dropsye; idropis; jdropicus qui patitur infirmitatem.
Occasionally, the morphological analysis becomes an explanation of the word origin, as in: and the Catholicon took quite different decisions.The compiler of the Promptorium parvulorum, a Dominican friar from Lynn Episcopi in Norfolk, stayed within the tradition which had by then developed for bilingual word lists: the overriding lexicographical principle was the grammatical one, the alphabetical one was subordinate.The word list was divided into a "nominale", containing all lexical items which were not verbs, and a "verbale", listing all the verbs.Grammatical homonyms are thus separated.The unknown compiler of the Catholicon Anglicum, however, made alphabetical order the overriding principle, thus producing a single word list for his users instead of two, which must have made con-sultation more difficult and time-consuming.Yet alphabetical order is interrupted and interspersed with word-family organization.This morphological principle may have been suggested to the compiler by the Latin source material.Take the entries based on the adjective lemma soft: Softe; molis, molliculus, mulcibris.
These edito-rial additions will be ignored here.The same holds for Herrtage's inser- number of symbols (a dagger, an asterisk) to indicate whether the entry word had already been discussed by Way in the Promptorium parvulorum edition or whether it was unique to the Catholicon Anglicum.
As we can see, the phrase and sentence examples are always introduced by the particle ut and they represent ordinary language use.They are not translated into English, the learners' mother tongue.Illustrative Stein 1997) the learners' mother tongue translated into the foreign language were to be one of the outstanding characteristics of the first English dictionary matching two vernaculars, John Palsgrave's Lesclarcissement de la languefrancoyse of 1530 (cf.Stein 1997).anExample; exemplum, exemplar, exemplum est dictum vel factum alicuius autentice persone mutaci-