Occurrences

The area ‘occurrences’ holds all information on where a certain lemma is attested in the OE texts. The following information is given: Short title of the text as specifyed by Bierbaumer 1975-79, or, if the entry was collected recently, COE short title and Cameron number in brackets; the exact location of the lemma within the text; the grammatical case of the occurrence (as provided by Bierbaumer 1974-76); the Latin plant-name (for glosses only), and, of course, the Old English record.

Under the attestation of āc are given, for example: LB, 21/7, nasg, ac; or Erf, 235 COLOR aac. We also want to make these occurrences directly available in the Corpus of Old English, where a cross reference would look like this: Lch II (1) (B21.2.1.1.2), 0286 (23.1.5), nasg, ac; or: ErfGl 1 (D36.1), 235, COLOR, aac. Relaying on the means of the internet we do not ‘translate’ the old citation form into a new one but we provide a direct link to the COE: anyone with access to the Corpus can automatically view the occurrence in a broader context. Each line of our occurrences provides three separate links to the COE. The link behind the short title opens a corpus query for the OE word in combination with the Cameron number. Klicking the OE word triggeres a corpus-wide search for this term without any restricitons. Klicking the L vocable (in case of glosses) triggeres a corpus-wide search for the L word without any restricitons. Mind that due to the rather complex query strategies of the COE the links do not always provide suitable results.

We only aim at a comprehensive recording of occurrences if the OE lemma denotes a plant name. When listing only exemplary occurrences we do point this out in the comment-filed and the user can research further instances with either the DOE (equally exemplary recording) or the COE.

When an occurrence starts with Đeos wyrt (e.g. HA) we generally leave this introductory phrase out. When recording the grammatical case we will only differentiate between nominative and accusative singular if there is a formal difference (e.g. for the n-declension) and if a distinction is possible and desirable. In most cases a separation of nsg. and asg. is impossible because in medical texts the case of plants listed after transitive verbs can change between nominative or accusative singular. This can be seen from formally marked nsg. forms found in such lists, e.g. LB I, ch. xxx: Wiþ swile cunille, […] clate wyl on buteran ‘against a swelling wild thyme, […], great bur, boil in butter’; in a non-medical text the forms would have to be cunillan, clatan. For similar reasons dative and instrumental singular are subsumed under ‘dsg’. Nominative and accusative plural are always listed under one heading (napl.): In cases where asg. and napl. are identical (particularly with female nouns of the n-decl.) the main criterion for differentiation is the syntactic and semantic context. If this context fails to provide a clear distinction we classify the instance as asg. because in medical recipes plants are in general used in the singular.