Page:Evolution of English Lexicography.djvu/16

us are not older, or not so old—must from their nature go back as glossaries to a still earlier date, and the Leiden to an earlier still; so that we carry back these beginnings of lexicography in England to a time somewhere between 600 and 700 A.D., and probably to an age not long posterior to the introduction of Christianity in the south of England at the end of the sixth century. Many more vocabularies were compiled between these early dates and the eleventh century; and it is noteworthy that those ancient glossaries and vocabularies not only became fuller and more orderly as time advanced, but they also became more English. For, as I have already mentioned, the primary purpose of the glosses was to explain difficult Latin words; this was done at first, whenever possible, by easier Latin words; apparently, only when none such were known, was the explanation given in the vernacular, in Old English. In the Epinal Glossary the English words are thus relatively few. In the first page they number thirty out of 117, and in some pages they do not amount to half that number. In the Corpus Glossary they have become proportionally more numerous; and in the glossaries that follow, the Latin explanations are more and more eliminated and replaced by English ones, until the vocabularies of the tenth and eleventh centuries, whether arranged alphabetically or under classified headings, are truly Latin-English: every Latin word given is explained by an English one; and we see clearly that a new aim had gradually evolved itself; the object was no longer to explain difficult Latin