Fragment of a Latin grammar and its Hungarian glosses from the archives of the convent of Kolozsmonostor

Abstract

In the Benedictine monastery of Kolozsmonostor (today Cluj-Mănăștur), a public authentication office operated from the first half of the 14th century to the middle of the 16th century. The authentication office issued legal documents and copied their texts into protocols. Two bifolia, which are to be presented in the study, were used as covers for protocols containing the copies of charters issued between 1447 and 1450 (HU-MNL-OL-DL 36391). These folios come from Alexander de Villa Dei’s textbook entitled Doctrinale puerorum. The protocols recorded on the spot may have been covered by leaves of locally used codices, so the grammar fragment can provide a glimpse into the educational situation in Kolozsmonostor/Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca). The significance of the fragment is enhanced by the glosses in Hungarian that it contains, which do not only support the Hungarian provenance of the former codex copied in the 14th century but also enrich the range of old language records of Hungarian. The native entries can be seen in interlinear positions of four lines in the preserved section of the grammar book that lists certain Latin verbs as examples. These glosses contain synonyms and nouns in the accusative in Latin as well. One of the users of the book – perhaps in order to make the verbs easier to memorize, or perhaps with the aim of expanding their vocabulary – glossed a few lines (although not carefully enough in some respects). In this study, we investigate written bilingualism and define the place of the entry in the system of language records. Then we present the Hungarian verbs of the glosses one by one, and we list the above-mentioned Latin glosses as well. Since the language record investigated originates from the 16th century or a few decades before that, we also try to draw conclusions from comparisons with the earliest Hungarian dictionaries.