[Sca-cooks] online glossary?

[tgl at mailer.uni-marburg.de]

<< Can we make this a group project, with someone proposing a few words
per week, & the rest of us finding citations & definitions for it?
(IMO, it beats talking about kittens.) >> (Cindy)

First, thanks you very much, Cindy, for providing an online version of
LCC. A good contribution to our textual resources!

As for an online glossary, I have three points that came to mind
recently. (I assume that you are thinking about a glossary of early
ENGLISH cookery terms. I have been working on a German counterpart for
some time, and I have read some articles by a romance philologist,
Sergio Lubello of Saarbrücken, who seems to be working on a dictionary
of early Italian cookery terms.)

Firstly: I think it would be good to have the whole textual basis for
such a glossary in an electronic, searchable form, even if some of these
texts are not available on the web for copyright reasons. From
electronic texts, one can produce indices and concordances of wordforms,
which are very helpful in compiling glossaries. Here is an example from
a working index to the text of Lancelot de Casteau (1604):

FARCY 107,9 109,8 121,4 126,13 149,19 157,15 157,17 158,11
FARCYS 101,20
FARINE 011,7 019,6 033,1 033,2 034,11 66,18 071,9 078,2 079,21 109,2
137,14

One can easily produce a short quotation (keyword in context) to each of
the references in a somewhat extended concordance list.

Secondly: There are already several technical glossaries in the editions
of early English cookery texts, e.g. in Curye on Inglish, the Harley
5401 edition, the Austin edition, the 'Ordinance of pottage'-edition. It
would be a good starting point to gather/to cumulate the information and
the references of these glossaries together with references given in the
OED, perhaps enriched by additional references from the electronic text
base.

Thirdly. As to the design, I have long thought of a model where there
are no _quotations_ any more, but a model of linking a glossary with an
electronic text base. Thus, in an _Amydon_-article you would have a
keyword (and its variants), a semantic description, perhaps some
comments, and then a list of links like "FC 39.3", klicking on which
will take you to the electronic text of the 'Forme of Curye' # 39, line
3 ("... flour of rys, o(th)er amydoun"). Alas, this is not easily
feasable nowadays because many texts are still under copyright.

More later (I hope),
Thomas