Gloss

Translations

glossa | glose | Glosse

Article

The term gloss is used in different ways in the philology of ancient texts. In general, the term should indicate a strange or difficult word present in a text. In classical philology, glosses appear both in primary literary works and in scholarly commentaries or true collections of glosses, starting from the classical age up until the late antique and medieval ages.

The significance of glosses for the study of language contact depends on the fact that frequently the glosses were foreign words or rare borrowings from a different language, which were identified by commentators and scholars who tried to explain the meaning and origin of the forms.< Over time, the word gloss passed from indicating the form that was commented upon to indicating the very commentaries.

A different use of the term gloss, derived from the original meaning, can be found in cuneiform philology. The ancient scribes all over the area of the cuneiform koiné occasionally marked specific words - which in some cases were foreign ones - by means of a special glyph that is usually referred to as gloss wedge or, in German, Glossenkeil. While the use of a gloss wedge does not entail the addition of a commentary, as was normally the case with the glosses of the classical tradition, there are a few cases in which the gloss wedge was instead employed to add an annotation to a text that was copied, but when this happened, normally, the commentary did not regard a specific foreign word. It is hence very important to distinguish between (a) gloss as a philological annotation added to a form by an ancient scholar and (b) gloss as a foreign or strange word appearing in a given text, which could have occasionally been marked as such by a scribe.

Example

An example of a gloss from the Classical tradition that is of relevance for the Anatolian languages is the word ζειγάρη, which Hesychius, in his Glossary, glosses as ὁ τέττιξ παρὰ Σιδήταις ‘the cicada among the Sidetians’ (cf. the entry in Beekes 2010, 497). In several cases, the glosses that are presented as loanwords are not attested in the corpora of the languages to which the ancient commentators assigned them, which makes them a precious but risky type of indirect evidence.

References

Beekes, R.S.P. 2010. Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Leiden: Brill.