In this period the primary concern of education was the teaching of Latin. The background against which the grammar must be understood is the early Middle Ages. After that, however, it fell into oblivion, and when it was unearthed in the 16th century, it was no longer seen as useful - it is interesting to note that Robert Talbot used the Latin examples to make sense of the original Old English, in a way reversing the original purpose of the grammar (cf Buckalew 1982).
It exists in many copies there are even copies with French glosses, and a Middle English adaptation was composed in the 13th century. It soon became very popular and was the dominant grammar in England until about the middle of the 12th century. After the Irish Auraicept it is the first European grammatical work ever to be written in a vernacular. Ælfric’s Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglice is an elementary grammar of Latin written in Old English in the 990’s (for a useful description and discussion of the work see Law 1997:200‒223, on which the short summary in this section is also based).
In this short paper I look at the origin of this surprising gloss and trace it back to a misinterpretation of an Ælfric-locus, which, in turn, exemplifies a certain terminological confusion in Ælfric’s original text.
Bosworth and Toller (1898 and then several editions), however, as well as Hall (1894 and then several editions, incorporating material from Bosworth and Toller) also indicate ‘word’ as a meaning of dæl. All dictionaries and glossaries of Old English list the word dæl and give ‘part’ as its only or primary meaning.
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