Abstract
The mere size of an author’s vocabulary is likely to tell us very little of value in assessing or understanding his work. Nevertheless, it is a statistic which has a perennial fascination. Scholars of the last generation repeatedly computed it for various authors, and their results are certain of incorporation into any student’s lecture notes. In fact, of course, precise comparative statistics are not usually available because the size of an author’s vocabulary depends essentially on the definition of ‘word’ adopted by the statistician. For example, do the three Chaucerian forms syngen, syngynge, and song represent three separate items of his vocabulary, or are they merely the differing grammatical representatives of a single item? A decision of this kind will, when repeated hundreds of times, greatly influence the final tally. Are proper nouns and variant spellings also to be included? Gower’s vocabulary, estimated at a remarkably precise 6006 items, falls drastically to 4648 when variants and proper names are excluded.1 Acknowleding such uncertainties, it has been estimated that Chaucer’s vocabulary is approximately twice that of Gower, that it equals that of the Authorised Version of the Bible, but is only one-third of that wielded by Shakespeare.2
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Notes
T. H. Kaplan, ‘Gower’s Vocabulary’ JEGP, XXXI (1932) 395–402.
J. Mersand, Chaucer’s Romance Vocabulary (Brooklyn: Comet Press, 1937) pp. 37–43. Mersand’s estimate of Chaucer’s vocabulary is 8430 words.
For a recent and illuminating discussion of lexical borrowing in the medieval period, see W. Rothwell, ‘Lexical Borrowing in a Medieval Context’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester, LXIII (1980) 118–43.
Mersand, Chaucer’s Romance Vocabulary, p. 43. The necessity of knowing the contemporary stylistic status of a word as well as its ultimate etymological origin is forcibly put by N. Davis in ‘Chaucer and Fourteenth Century English’, in D. S. Brewer (ed.), Geoffrey Chaucer (Writers and their Background) (London: Bell, 1974) pp. 71–8.
Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, edited by W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), II XX.
L. W. Daly and B. A. Daly (eds), Summa Britonis (Padua, 1975), s.v. Ambigo. Chaucer’s Troylus and Cryseyde compared with Boccaccio’s Filostrato, translated by Wm. Michael Rossetti, Chaucer Soc. First Series, XLIV (London, 1873) p. 264.
D. Reichling (ed.), Das Doctrinale des Alexander de Villa-Dei, Monumenta Germaniae Pedagogica, XII (Berlin: Hofmann, 1893), lines 2399–2403.
Edmund Reiss, ‘Chaucer’s deerne love and the Medieval View of Secrecy in Love’, in Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy (eds), Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives: Essays presented to Paul E. Beichner C. S. C. (Notre Dame University Press, 1979) pp. 164–79
John L. Lowes, ‘Simple and Coy: A Note on Fourteenth Century Poetic Diction’, Anglia, XXXIII (1910) 440–51.
R. I. Page, ‘How long did the Scandinavian language survive in England? The epigraphical evidence’, in Peter A. Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (eds), England Before the Conquest: Studies … presented to Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge U.P., 1971) pp. 165–81.
Mary S. Serjeantson, A History of Foreign Words in English (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner, 1935), p. 81.
A. Rynell, The Rivalry of Scandinavian and Native Synonyms in Middle English … Lund Studies in English, 13 (Lund: Gleerup, 1948) p. 363.
Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (1300–1500) (London: Cambridge University Press, 1948) p. 166.
In W. H. French and C. B. Hale (eds), The Middle English Metrical Romances, 2 vols (New York: Russel and Russel, 1964) vol. II, pp. 989–98. Compare also the mock-epic hero Reneward, a kitchen-boy with a club, in Duncan Macmillan (ed), La Chanson de Guillaume, 2 vols, SATF 74 (Paris, 1949) lines 2648–2717.
That capul is at once a Northern word and a vulgarism in Chaucer’s language is suggested by Ralph W. V. Elliott, Chaucer’s English (London: Deutsch, 1974) pp. 199–200; 392.
As it did in the illustration in the Morgan manuscript of the Roman. Douglas Gray, ‘Chaucer and “Pite”’ in Mary and Robert T. Farrell (eds), J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller (Ithaca: Cornell U.P. , 1979) p. 174
On the origins of this and some other learned glosses to the Man of Law’s Tale, see Lotario dei Segni, De Miseria Condicionis Humane, edited by Robert E. Lewis, The Chaucer Library (University of Georgia Press, 1978) pp. 32–9.
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© 1983 David Burnley
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Burnley, D. (1983). Chaucer’s Vocabulary. In: A Guide to Chaucer’s Language. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86048-7_6
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