Читать книгу A Catalogue of Manuscripts Known to Contain Old English Dry-Point Glosses - Dieter Studer-Joho - Страница 19

The “Echternach Gospels” – Paris, Bibliothèque nationale lat. 9389Paris, Bibliothèque nationalelat. 9389 [G:893], written around AD 700 in Northumbria or an Insular centre on the Continent – have long been suspected of featuring an OE gloss, at times even two OE glosses.1 Several articles have been published on the topic, but no detailed linguistic study successfully arguing that any of the glosses are OE has been published to date. CLA (5 [1950]: 578) reports a single, supposedly OE dry-point gloss bigine glossing L. incipientes (Jn 8: 9) on f. 194^r.2 Muller (1985: 67–69) edits 10 dry-point glosses from the MS, of which he identifies 2 as OHG (including the gloss bigine that CLA thought to be OE) and 8 as L. In a first draft of his edition (Muller 1983), which Muller himself later considered to be obsolete (cf. Muller 1985: 69, n. 226), Muller had thought the above-mentioned gloss bigine and another dry-point gloss, which he read as scip (Muller 1983: 388), to be OE. Muller later (Muller 1985), however, argues convincingly that bigine ought to be considered OHG and the other gloss to be L. s cip, meaning L. s[cilicet] cip ‘read “cip” [instead of coep]’, which he assumes to be a (partial) emendation of the text’s original L. coepimus (Lk 5:5). Hence, while Muller (1983: 389) initially agreed with CLA that the form bigine was OE, two years later (1985: 69) he is in favour of OHG (“[d]och liegt eine Deutung aus dem Althochdeutschen näher”3).

Ó Cróinín, however, who is apparently not aware of Muller’s updated (1985) edition and instead refers to Muller’s retracted (1983) edition, repeats CLA’s claim that the gloss bigine is OE:

The Echternach Gospels have not usually been included in discussions of manuscripts containing Old English and Old High German glosses, although E.A. Lowe had pointed out (CLA V 578) the presence of one such OE dry-point entry (f. 194r incipientes gl. bigine). (Ó Cróinín 1999: 87)4

Ó Cróinín (1999) also edits an additional 9 or 10 L. dry-point glosses, which Muller (1985) does not mention, but Ó Cróinín also repeats Muller’s retracted (1983) reading scip without specifying its supposed linguistic status. Ó Cróinín does not explicitly discuss any of the forms, but he appears to be in favour of OE, at least for the gloss bigine.

Glaser (1997: 17–18) edits 12 dry-point glosses from the “Echternach Gospels”, 10 of which had not been edited before, and she only cautiously refers to them as “volkssprachig”.5 BStK (1478) – presumably based on Glaser & Moulin-Fankhänel (1999: 108) – refers to 12 dry-point glosses and reports the language of all the vernacular glosses in the “Echternach Gospels” as “unbestimmt”.6 The majority of German scholars mentioning the dry-point glosses in the “Echternach Gospels” is undecided: “altenglische oder althochdeutsche Stilusglosse” (Ebersperger 1999: 110);7 “wohl alle deutsch […] (englisch in einigen Fällen nicht ausgeschlossen)” (Seebold 2001: 36);8 “[a]ltenglisch in einigen Fällen aber doch nicht völlig ausgeschlossen” (Köbler 2005: 511);9 “Glossen in beiden Sprachen […] (wohl auch) im Echternacher Evangeliar” (Bulitta 2011: 166);10 no gloss in particular, however, is explicitly declared to be OE. That means that the inclusion of the “Echternach Gospels” as an OE dry-point gloss MS in our current Catalogue really only hinges on the conflicting statements about the linguistic attribution of the gloss bigine.

The reading bigine (with Insular <ᵹ>) for the gloss in question is confirmed by CLA (5: 578), Muller (1983: 389), Muller (1985: 69), Glaser (1997: 18), Ó Cróinín (1999: 87) and Glaser & Moulin-Fankhänel (1999: 108).11 Nievergelt & De Wulf (2015) point out the existence of a further letter after <e>, perhaps <c>. Muller offers hand-drawn reproductions of the dry-point material (1983: 386 and 1985: 70) and he hints at the possibility that there might be an abbreviation stroke on top of <n>,12 but his reproductions do not document that mark and none of the other editors mention it; Nievergelt & De Wulf (2015) clearly reject the notion after having autopsied the dry-point writing.

CLA’s (5: 578) and Muller’s (1983: 10) initial (but later retracted) identification of the form bigine as OE and the subsequent unassertive treatment of that gloss in OHG scholarly literature is motivated, at least partly, by the fact that the form bigine does not fit OHG expectations; especially the single -n- of the form is suspicious, but it is only rarely attested in OE, too. Since the gloss is formally incongruent with its lemma L. incipientes, some kind of abbreviation or merograph would have to be pre-supposed. Muller (1985: 69) tentatively (and in apparent disbelief) expands to OE biginnende; Nievergelt & De Wulf (2015: 92–94) reconstruct OHG *biginnag or OE *beginag ‘beginning’ while stressing that their reading somewhat hinges on the final <c>, which remains uncertain.

From the point of view of OE phonology, retention of i in unaccented syllable would be compatible with the early date of the glosses in the “Echternach Gospels”, which are generally dated sec. viii (e.g. BStK 1478 [no. 774b]). Although PGmc. *ƀi- (Orel 2003: 44–45) was generally reduced in unstressed positions to OE be-, and remained high front only in nominal formations where the stress came to rest on it, such as OE biggeng ‘practice’ (stressed on the first syllable) vs. OE begangan ‘to practice’ (stressed on the second), retention of i is in fact attested in very early texts (Campbell 1959: § 369). From the point of view of lexicography, however, it is important to note that among the various prefixal variants of -ginnan, be-ginnan is by far the least common in OE, with OE inginnan and OE onginnan being far more typical (as was already pointed out by Muller 1985: 69). Moreover, bi-ginnan with prefixal bi- is never attested in an early OE text and only rarely in the whole corpus, anyway: Out of 200 forms of OE beginnan recorded in the DOEC 2009, only two forms show the prefix bi-: it is attested once in the continuous gloss of the “Rushworth Gospels” (Oxford, Bodleian Library Auctarium D. 2. 19Oxford, Bodleian LibraryAuctarium D. 2. 19 [K:292], with OE biginnes glossing L. coeperitis in Lk 3:8), probably added sec. x, and once in two late copies (sec. xiv and sec. xvi) of a royal L. grant with OE bounds (Sawyer 1968: no. 556; dated A.D. 951, OE bigan). The two late copies may safely be ruled out as evidence, as the prefix bi- is in accordance with ME usage (MED s.v. “biginnen”) and hence not necessarily original. With the “Rushworth Gospels”, on the other hand, it is interesting to note that the “Lindisfarne Gospels” (British Library Cotton Nero D. ivLondon, British LibraryCotton Nero D. iv [K:165]), which are assumed to have been copied from the same exemplar, show OE beginnes. Incidentally, OE biginnes is the only form of the verb beginnan in the “Rushworth Gospels”; the far more common synonym is OE onginnan, occurring more than two dozen times in the Gospel of Luke alone (cf. Tamoto 2013).

Summing up, there is no unequivocal evidence that the form bigine cannot be OE; yet, bearing in mind that the OHG cognate of the verb shows prefixal bi- (AWB s.v. “bi-ginnan”, not including this particular gloss in its apparatus of forms) and that the other 11 vernacular glosses in the “Echternach Gospels” are “mehr oder weniger sicher” OHG (Glaser 1997: 18),13 I am not inclined to accept bigine as an OE form at the moment. CLA’s and Ó Cróinín’s appraisals of the gloss as OE are not provided with verifiable analyses. Muller (1985) argues in favour of OHG; Nievergelt & De Wulf (2015: 103) are reluctant to decide either in favour of OHG or OE, they rather propose some continental West Germanic context, other than OHG. Therefore, the “Echternach Gospels” are not included in the Catalogue below, as they cannot confidently be said to feature an OE dry-point gloss until a detailed analysis to that effect is published.

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 6402München, Bayerische StaatsbibliothekClm 6402 (BStK: 1060–1062 [no. 536]) features a large number of dry-point additions, consisting of letters, doodles or unidentifiable scratches. The main part of the MS was perhaps written in Verona, sec. viii or ix; the first part of the MS (ff. 1–18) was added in Freising, sec. viii^4/4, where the MS remained until the secularization of 1803 (cf. BStK: 1061; Nievergelt 2009: 180). Nievergelt (2009: 180–187) lists over 60 very difficult dry-point additions, including names and L. glosses, but for most of them only individual letters are decipherable to him. Only one dry-point gloss added in a partial vowel substitution cipher (a=b; u=x) is sufficiently legible for Nievergelt to attempt an interpretation. His reading is OHG(?) inbxbnxịḷị glossing L. inhabitare ‘to dwell in’. Undoing the substitutions, Nievergelt (2009: 182) interprets the gloss tentatively as OHG inbuan uịḷị ‘wants (3^rd pers. sing. pres. ind.) to dwell in’. The reading of the last three letters is doubtful, however, and Nievergelt cautions that the interpretation of the second word is therefore highly speculative.14 More importantly for our concern, however, Nievergelt also points out that OE background is at least imaginable for the first word inbuan, because the form of this infinitive, which glosses the infinitive inhabitare of the L. base text (JUVENCUS, Evangeliorum libri quattuor I, 301), would be the same in both OHG and OE.15 The evidence is inconclusive at the moment, as none of the other dry-point fragments supplies enough information to corroborate either interpretation. No OE dry-point glosses have been associated with Freising so far and since the MS also features 22 OHG ink glosses, I do not think that the MS ought to be considered for inclusion in the Catalogue, based on the present evidence. Further work on these difficult glosses may perhaps provide sufficient data to readdress the issue one day.