ABSTRACT

This article concentrates on the evidence for the study of Middle Dutch (MDut)-origin words in the Durham Account Rolls (DAR), a set of texts produced in Medieval Latin but deeply informed by the vernaculars (Middle English and Anglo-French). The analysis of the 47 MDut-derived lexemes present in the DAR exposes one of the intrinsic problems in the study of the mutual lexical influences between Germanic languages, which is of a typological nature: the proximity between West Germanic languages – Middle Dutch/Middle Low German and Dutch/English – and the presence of cognates and morphological and phonological similarities may obscure the etymology of words which could have potentially been borrowed or, alternatively, developed independently in English out of common Germanic roots. It also underscores how the study of MDut-origin vocabulary can advance our understanding of the lexico-semantic make-up of multilingual texts.

摘要

本文重点介绍Durham Account Rolls ( DAR ) 中源自中古荷兰语 (MDut) 的单词的研究证据，这是一套用中世纪拉丁语制作但深受白话文（中古英语和英法）影响的文本。对DAR 中存在的 47 个 MDut 衍生词位的分析揭示了研究日耳曼语言之间相互词汇影响的内在问题之一，这是类型学性质的：西日耳曼语言之间的接近度——中古荷兰语/中低地德语和荷兰语/英语——以及同源词和形态学的存在和语音上的相似性可能会掩盖可能被借用的词的词源，或者，从共同的日耳曼词根中独立发展而来的词。它还强调了对 MDut 起源词汇的研究如何促进我们对多语言文本的词汇语义构成的理解。