Claretus And the City. The Glossarius, Its Latin Neologisms and Its Reception in Municipal Administrative Texts

0573691 - FLÚ 2024 RIV DE eng J - Journal Article
Nývlt, Pavel
Claretus And the City. The Glossarius, Its Latin Neologisms and Its Reception in Municipal Administrative Texts.
Trends in Classics. Roč. 15, č. 1 (2023), s. 131-164. ISSN 1866-7473. E-ISSN 1866-7481
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : Medieval Latin * word formation * medieval dictionaries * medieval administrative texts * Claretus
OECD category: Specific languages
Impact factor: 0.2, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://doi.org/10.1515/tc-2023-0007

The influence of Medieval Latin dictionaries on other genres of Medieval Latin literature was limited by two factors: their tendency to preserve ancient hapaxes that appeared nowhere else, and their creativity, resulting in the formation of words no other writer used. A prime example of the latter attitude are the poems written by a 14th-century Czech lexicographer known as Claretus. After a brief outline of the structure of his last and longest versed dictionary, the Glossarius, Claretus’ knack for word-formation is illustrated by several hundred nouns denoting activities, actions, and persons with selected suffixes. Documents created by municipal administration in the 14th and 15th centuries also contain a goodly number of neologisms, even hapax legomena, and verbal overlaps alone are by no means sufficient to prove their authors were acquainted with Claretus’ poems. Nevertheless, I argue that Claretus’ influence is detectable in a handful of administrative texts from medieval Bohemia.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0344348