[Sca-cooks] online glossary? - long

[Cindy M. Renfrow]

>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.

Yes, but I would like to link it to glossaries of other languages cookery
terms, since there is so much overlap.

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.)

Are these online? And is there one of French terms?

Prospect Books has done a glossary
http://www.kal69.dial.pipex.com/gloss.htm#glossary of 17th & 18th century
terms from 7 works including Digby.

>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.

:-)  Yes, it would be ideal, and we are getting it accomplished bit by bit
(or is that byte by byte?), but I would not wish to wait the many years
such a project would take in order to compile our glossary.

I've made a separate list of all the texts I know to be online & have
enclosed it in another email.  Please have a look & let me know if you know
of other available texts.


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

When confronted with a list like this (and I have been guilty of making
them, too), I will dutifully look up each listing, but it's a pain in the
keester. I would much rather be able to access all the information at once.

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

I don't think it is necessary to provide quotations and a complete index
for all terms, just the less commonly used ones.  If we were to attempt to
catalog the occurence of the words for saffron, for example, we would be
faced with the daunting (and useless) task of indexing thousands these
scribal errors. ;-)  But definitions and indexing for words like "walm",
"wheterydoun", and less commonly used ingredients would be useful.

Illustrations, if available, would be useful, too.

>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.

Yes, but the glossaries in the more recent works are under copyright, are
they not?  One would have to be careful not to duplicate them.

>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.

I see no copyright issue in this, since you would merely be referring
people to the text, not copying it on your page.  But I think this would
require embedded "targets" in the document, and the cooperation of the
hosting site, would it not?

Regards,

Cindy