Cincius, according to Festus (330b. 2), wrote De verbis priscis; Santra, De antiquitate verborum (Festus 277a. 2).
Of Latin glossaries of the first four centuries of the Roman emperors few traces are left, if we except Verrius-Festus. Charis, 229. 30, speaks of glossae antiquitatum and 242. 10 of glossae veterum, but it is not known whether these glosses are identic, or in what relation they stand to the glossemata per litteras Latinas ordine composita, which were incorporated with the works of this grammarian according to the index in Keil, p. 6. Latin glosses occur in Ps.-Philoxenus, and Nonius must have used Latin glossaries; there exists a glossarium Plautinum (Ritschl, Op. ii. 234 sqq.), and the bilingual glossaries have been used by the later grammarian Martyrius; but of this early period we know by name only Fulgentius and Placidus, who is sometimes called Luctatius Placidus, by confusion with the Statius scholiast, with whom the glossae Placidi have no connexion. All that we know of him tends to show that he lived in North Africa (like Fulgentius and Nonius and perhaps Charisius) in the 6th century, from whence his glosses came to Spain, and were used by Isidore and the compiler of the Liber glossarum (see below). These glosses we know from (1) Codices Romani (15th and 16th century); (2) the Liber glossarum; (3) the Cod. Paris. nov. acquis. 1298 (saec. xi.), a collection of glossaries, in which the Placidus-glosses are kept separate from the others, and still retain traces of their original order (cf. the editions published by A. Mai, Class. auct. iii. 427–503, and Deuerling, 1875; Goetz, Corp. v.; P. Karl, “De Placidi glossis,” Comm. Ien. vii. 2. 99, 103 sqq.; Loewe, Gloss. Nom. 86; F. Bücheler, in Thesaur. gloss. emend.). His collection includes glosses from Plautus and Lucilius.
(Fabius Planciades) Fulgentius (c. A.D. 468–533) wrote Expositio sermonum antiquorum (ed. Rud. Helm, Lips. 1898; cf. Wessner, Comment. Ien. vi. 2. 135 sqq.) in sixty-two paragraphs, each containing a lemma (sometimes two or three) with an explanation giving quotations and names of authors. Next to him come the glossae Nonianae, which arose from the contents of the various paragraphs in Nonius Marcellus’ work being written in the margin without the words of the text; these epitomized glosses were alphabetized and afterwards copied for other collections (see Goetz, Corp. v. 637 sqq., id. v. Praef. xxxv.; Onions and Lindsay, Harvard Stud. ix. 67 sqq.; Lindsay, Nonii praef. xxi.). In a similar way arose the glossae Eucherii or glossae spiritales secundum Eucherium episcopum found in many MSS. (cf. K. Wotke, Sitz. Ber. Akad. Wien, cxv. 425 sqq.; = the Corpus Glossary, first part), which are an alphabetical extract from the formulae spiritalis intelligentiae of St Eucherius, bishop of Lyons, c. 434–450.[1]
Other sources were the Differentiae, already known to Placidus and much used in the medieval glossaries; and the Synonyma Ciceronis; cf. Goetz, “Der Liber glossarum,” in Abhandl. der philol.-hist. Cl. der sächs. Gesellsch. d. Wiss., 1893, p. 215; id. in Berl. philol. Wochenschr., 1890, p. 195 sqq.; Beck, in Wochenschr., p. 297 sqq., and Sittls, ibid. p. 267; Archiv f. lat. Lex. vi. 594; W. L. Mahne, (Leid. 1850, 1851); also various collections of scholia. By the side of the scholiasts come the grammarians, as Charisius, or an ars similar to that ascribed to him; further, treatises de dubiis generibus, the scriptores orthographici (especially Caper and Beda), and Priscianus, the chief grammarian of the middle ages (cf. Goetz in Mélanges Boissier, 224).
During the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries glossography developed in various ways; old glossaries were worked up into new forms, or amalgamated with more recent ones. It ceased, moreover, to be exclusively Latin-Latin, and interpretations in Germanic (Old High German, Anglo-Saxon) and Romanic dialects took the place of or were used side by side with earlier Latin ones. The origin and development of the late classic and medieval glossaries preserved to us can be traced with certainty. While reading the manuscript texts of classical authors, the Bible or early Christian and profane writers, students and teachers, on meeting with any obscure or out-of-the-way words which they considered difficult to remember or to require elucidation, wrote above them, or in the margins, interpretations or explanations in more easy or better-known words. The interpretations written above the line are called “interlinear,” those written in the margins of the MSS. “marginal glosses.” Again, MSS. of the Bible or portions of the Bible were often provided with literal translations in the vernacular written above the lines of the Latin version (interlinear versions).
Of such glossed MSS. or translated texts, photographs may be seen in the various palaeographical works published in recent years; cf. The Palaeogr. Society, 1st ser. vol. ii. pls. 9 (Terentius MS. of 4th or 5th century, interlinear glosses) and 24 (Augustine’s epistles, 6th or 7th century, marginal glosses); see further, plates 10, 12, 33, 40, 50-54, 57, 58, 63, 73, 75, 80; vol. iii. plates 10, 24, 31, 39, 44, 54, 80.
From these glossed or annotated MSS. and interlinear versions glossaries were compiled; that is, the obscure and difficult Latin words, together with the interpretations, were excerpted and collected in separate lists, in the order in which they appeared, one after the other, in the MSS., without any alphabetical arrangement, but with the names of the authors or the titles of the books whence they were taken, placed at the head of each separate collection or chapter. In this arrangement each article by itself is called a gloss; when reference is made only to the word explained it is called the lemma, while the explanation is termed the interpretamentum. In most cases the form of the lemma was retained just as it stood in its source, and explained by a single word (tesca: sancta, Varro vii. 10; clucidatus: suavis, id. vii. 107; cf. Isid. Etym. i. 30. 1, “quid enim illud sit in uno verbo positum declarat [scil. glossa] ut conticescere est tacere”), so that we meet with lemmata in the accusative, dative and genitive, likewise explained by words in the same cases; the forms of verbs being treated in the same way. Of this first stage in the making of glossaries, many traces are preserved, for instance, in the late 8th century Leiden Glossary (Voss. 69, ed. J. H. Hessels), where chapter iii. contains words or glosses excerpted from the Life of St Martin by Sulpicius Severus; chs. iv., v. and xxxv. glosses from Rufinus; chs. vi. and xl. from Gildas; chs. vii. to xxv. from books of the Bible (Paralipomenon; Proverbs, &c., &c.); chs. xxvi. to xlviii, from Isidore, the Vita S. Anthonii, Cassiodorus, St Jerome, Cassianus, Orosius, St Augustine, St Clement, Eucherius, St Gregory, the grammarians Donatus, Phocas, &c. (See also Goetz, Corp. v. 546. 23–547. 6. and i. 5-40 from Ovid’s Metam.; v. 657 from Apuleius, De deo Socratis; cf. Landgraf, in Arch. ix. 174).
By a second operation the glosses came to be arranged in alphabetical order according to the first letter of the lemma, but still retained in separate chapters under the names of authors or the titles of books. Of this second stage the Leiden Glossary contains traces also: ch. i. (Verba de Canonibus) and ii. (Sermones de Regulis); see Goetz, Corp. v. 529 sqq. (from Terentius), iv. 427 sqq. (Virgil).
The third operation collected all the accessible glosses in alphabetical order, in the first instance according to the first letters of the lemmata. In this arrangement the names of the authors or the titles of the books could no longer be preserved, and consequently the sources whence the glosses were excerpted became uncertain, especially if the grammatical forms of the lemmata had been normalized.
A fourth arrangement collected the glosses according to the first two letters of the lemmata, as in the Corpus Glossary and in the still earlier Cod. Vat. 3321 (Goetz, Corp. iv. 1 sqq.), where even many attempts were made to arrange them according to the first three letters of the alphabet. A peculiar arrangement is seen in the Glossae affatim (Goetz, Corp. iv. 471 sqq.), where all words are alphabetized, first according to the initial letter of the word (a, b, c, &c.), and then further according to the first vowel in the word (a, e, i, o, u).
No date or period can be assigned to any of the above stages or arrangements. For instance, the first and second are both found in the Leiden Glossary, which dates from the end of the 8th century, whereas the Corpus Glossary, written in the beginning of the same century, represents already the fourth stage.
For the purpose of identification titles have of late years been given to the various nameless collections of glosses, derived partly from their first lemma, partly from other characteristics, as glossae abstrusae; glossae abavus major and minor; g. affatim; g. ab absens; g. abactor; g. Abba Pater; g. a, a; g. Vergilianae; g. nominum (Goetz, Corp. ii. 563, iv.); g. Sangallenses (Warren, Transact. Amer. Philol. Assoc. xv., 1885, p. 141 sqq.).
A chief landmark in glossography is represented by the Origines (Etymologiae) of Isidore (d. 636), an encyclopedia in which he, like Cassiodorus, mixed human and divine subjects together. In many places we can trace his sources, but he also used glossaries. His work became a great mine for later glossographers. In the tenth book he deals with the etymology of many substantives and adjectives arranged alphabetically according to the first letter of the words, perhaps by himself from various sources. His principal source is Servius, then the fathers of the Church (Augustine, Jerome,
- ↑ The so-called Malberg glosses, found in various texts of the Lex Salica, are not glosses in the ordinary sense of the word, but precious remains of the parent of the present literary Dutch, namely, the Low German dialect spoken by the Salian Franks who conquered Gaul from the Romans at the end of the 5th century. It is supposed that the conquerors brought their Frankish law with them, either written down, or by oral tradition; that they translated it into Latin for the sake of the Romans settled in the country, and that the translators, not always knowing a proper Latin equivalent for certain things or actions, retained in their translations the Frankish technical names or phrases which they had attempted to translate into Latin. E.g. in chapter ii., by the side of “porcellus lactans” (a sucking-pig), we find the Frankish “chramnechaltio,” lit. a stye-porker. The person who stole such a pig (still kept in an enclosed place, in a stye) was fined three times as much as one who stole a “porcellus de campo qui sine matre vivere possit,” as the Latin text has it, for which the Malberg technical expression appears to have been ingymus, that is, a one year (winter) old animal, i.e. a yearling. Nearly all these glosses are preceded by “mal” or “malb,” which is thought to be a contraction for “malberg,” the Frankish for “forum.” The antiquity and importance of these glosses for philology may be realized from the fact that the Latin translation of the Lex Salica probably dates from the latter end of the 5th century. For further information cf. Jac. Grimm’s preface to Joh. Merkel’s ed. (1850), and H. Kern’s notes to J. H. Hessels’s ed. (London, 1880) of the Lex Salica.
