it’s kalamazoo weekend! which makes me very sad that i’m not a literary scholar anymore, not even a baby one. *sniffle*on the subject though of reading medieval things, what is the current gold standard in latin/ oe / old french dictionaries (preferably available free online?)
not, you understand, that i do any work at all in this area (and my languages are in embarrassing decrepitude) but since i subscribe to dozens of blogs and academic journals to do with paleography, book arts, med-ren literature and culture, there is a constant stream of short passages, transcriptions, manuscript images and facsimiles, and associated academic discussions floating into my view each day. i neither need nor want paid access to proper scholarly research or lexical resources to read these things — they are, quite simply, no longer my field — and the fact is with so many posts flooding in each day i have no time to do more than merely scan headlines… but now and then, i do want to read a little of the source text or look up one or two words, so i rather value having quick and easy access to reference works which are sufficiently fit for scholarly reading and are sensitive to the linguistic history of the periods involved.
right now i have a grubby clarke hall for OE, liddell and scott for greek, med online for middle english. for latin i have a cassell’s (not very good, but lewis and short is available on perseus to supplement it.) i’ve never been formally taught old or middle french and have little confidence in reading, so i rarely look at original sources (and when i do i depend on online of-english lexicons only. for chinese (classic or modern) i find it easiest to use online resources (sometimes i use the mother.) i am completely and utterly incapable of reading italian or norse or old high german, and in those cases i like interlineal texts (because even if i can’t actually read the text i like looking at forms) - but if someone thinks there’s a good X-to-english dictionary (online) that might want to check out i welcome suggestions and links to resources!
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird