Vollstes Verständnis? Lateinisch-volkssprachige Glossen als Belegzitate im Althochdeutschen Wörterbuch*

Abstract The Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch (AWB – Dictionary of Old High German) aims at providing a complete and exhaustive record of the German language during that period, beginning with the advent of Christianity around the middle of the 8th century and extending usually to the 11th and 12th centuries reaching beyond this period into the 13th or even the 14th century in a few cases. In every respect, our record of German words is closely linked to the Latin texts current at that time. This means that the bulk of the dictionary entries consists of glosses, either elucidating Latin texts or taken straight from bilingual glossaries, while continuous texts in Old High German are quite often renderings of Latin originals. The glosses just mentioned are German words added on the margins of manuscripts or above the line aiming at providing a better and easier access to the contents or clarifying the syntax of a Latin text. Since these can usually be understood without difficulty, these correspondences between Latin and German words allow us to define to a certain degree the meaning of those German words within a given context. For this reason, in the AWB we always provide the Latin phrases these German words are supposed to clarify and have devised a special system for doing so, in particular for defining the beginning and the end of the text to be quoted as well as the actual reference word (‘Latin lemma’) glossed. Not seldom problems caused by the difficult transmission of some texts and inherent difficulties of interpretation demand in these dictionary entries specific techniques for supplying further data or even providing some sort of a commentary, tasks usually associated rather with philology proper than with lexicography.