Compound Formation for Garment Names in glosses 

Dr Stuart Nels Rutten
The University of Manchester

The lexis of garment names in Medieval Britain is a particularly useful collection of 
terms to illustrate semantic and lexical gaps in languages. Garments crossed linguistic 
boundaries creating the need for native languages to fill new semantic gaps in the 
language to identify new articles of ceremonial or fashionable dress, and the need for 
doing so in a convenient manner for native speaker who were attempting to adapt to 
new fashions and rituals. When creating native terms for incoming garments, the 
medieval glossator was bound not only by the existing vocabulary in the native 
community but by the need to fill the gap quickly, and sometimes only temporarily, in 
the most convenient way for the native learner. This paper examines some of the 
pragmatic aspects involved in creating native terminology as seen in different 
versions of Ælfric’s glossary.