Gloss

A gloss (from koine Greek ?????? glossa, meaning 'tongue') is a note made in the margins or between the lines of a book, in which the meaning of the text in its original language is explained, sometimes in another language. As such, glosses can vary in thoroughness and complexity, from simple marginal notations of words one reader found difficult or obscure, to entire interlinear translations of the original text and cross references to similar passages.

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A collection of glosses is a glossary. A collection of medieval legal glosses, made by the socalled glossators commeting legal texts, is called an apparatus. The compilation of glosses into glossaries was the beginning of lexicography, and the glossaries so compiled were in fact the first dictionaries.

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Glosses are of some importance in philology, especially if one language—usually, the language of the author of the gloss—has left few texts of its own. The Reichenau glosses, for example, gloss the Latin Vulgate Bible in an early form of one of the Romance languages, and as such give insight into late Vulgar Latin at a time when that language was not often written down. A series of glosses in the Old English language to Latin Bibles give us a running translation of Biblical texts in that language; see Old English Bible translations. Glosses of Christian religious texts are also important for our knowledge of Old Irish. Glosses frequently shed valuable light on the vocabulary of otherwise little attested languages; they are less reliable for syntax, because many times the glosses follow the word order of the original text, and translate its idioms literally.

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Glosses are extremely important in theology. They are a primary format in medieval Biblical theology, and were studied and memorized almost upon their own merit, without regards to the author. Many times a Biblical passage was heavily associated with a particular gloss, whose truth was taken for granted by many theologians. This phenomenon occurred also in medieval law: the glosses on Roman law and canon law created for many subjects standard starting points of reference, a socalled sedes materiae (literally: seat of the matter).

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In modern linguistics, interlinear glosses are often used between a text and its translation. It has become standard to gloss each morpheme separately when these are relevant; a semi-standardized set of conventions and abbreviations can be found at the Leipzig Glossing Rules.

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Koine Greek: Koine Greek (????? ????????) is an ancient Greek dialect which marks the 2nd stage in the history of the Greek language. Other names are Alexandrian, Hellenistic or New Testament Greek. Koine Greek is not only important to the history of the Greeks for being their first common dialect and main ances...

Book: :This page is about bound sheets of paper. For the graph theory concept, see Book (graph theory). For the musical theater meaning, see Book (musical theater)....

Text: In language, text is a broad term for something that contains words to express something....