Page:Medicina de quadrupedibus.djvu/12

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VIII
Introduction.

is found. The second, besides establishing the text with great care, gives a general description of the ms., followed by observations on its relation to the older English copies of the Herbarimn, on its spelling, date, and dialect, and by a full account of its sounds and forms. My edition of the Medicina being intended exclusively for a contribution to the study of early ME. grammar, I have of course adopted the latter plan and considered it my duty to write an introduction similar to that of Mr. Berberich. I have, however, deviated from the model his work offered me in a few points where improvement seemed possible. In doing so I have paid special attention to the observations made on the matter by Prof. Forster in his able review of the Herbarium.[1] The main changes thus introduced are the separation, in the Phonetics, of the weakly accented and unaccented syllables from the others; the use of spaced italics in the Phonetics and in the Accidence to denote the spellings which seem characteristic of ME.[2], and the addition of a glossary where all the words of the text are recorded with the forms under which they occur and numerous references to pages and lines.

The following points are to be noticed by those who use the present publication:

10. The text has been copied out with the greatest accuracy possible. However it has been thought useless to reproduce all its features and principally its obvious mistakes where they offer no linguistic interest. Thus wriꝥ 615 has been mormalized into wriþ and lœcecrœftef 29, where the two œs evidently represent æ and where the second f
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  1. cf. the list of books referred to p. VI.
  2. In determining those spellings I have been guided principally by Bülbring’s and Sievers’s works.