6.0. Vocabularius Nebrissensis/Epithoma Vocabulorum

Nebrija's influence was felt in Spanish lexicography until the eighteenth century, and his lexicographical heritage extended throughout Europe for at least two centuries, although it was not generally acknowledged (Lépinette 1992: 228).  [85] One of the earliest adaptations of the Lexicon is a Latin-Catalan/Catalan-Latin dictionary entitled Vocabularius Aelij Antonij Nebrissensis, in which Nebrija's Spanish terms are replaced by Catalan terms. This work, apparently based on the 1506 (Seville) edition of the Lexicon, was translated and edited by Gabriel Busa, a monk from the Augustinian monastery in Barcelona, and first printed in 1507.

Busa respected the integrity of Nebrija's work: he did not add entries to the nomenclature and he systematically substituted a Catalan term for a Spanish term in the microstructure. The only modification is the occasional appearance of a Catalan term for a Latin lemma which either is not translated in the Lexicon or has a Latin equivalent (Lépinette 1992: 230).

6.1. Sources of the Vocabularius nebrissensis/Epithoma vocabulorum (VN/EV)

6.1.1. Vocabularius Aelij Antonij Nebrissensis

Lépinette (1992: 238) notes that the lemmata in d) above are absent from the Catholicon, and surmises that when the author of VN did not know the French translation for a Catalan term, and the lemma was not included in a text to which he could refer, he often did not eliminate the term from his own nomenclature but substituted a calque of the Catalan form. (It seems certain that his understanding of Catalan was limited.)

From a comparison of 587 entries in four samples, Lépinette (1992: 240) calculates that additions to the macrostructure of the VN which do not appear in Busa or Nebrija amount to roughly ten percent. of VN's macrostructure. A large number are drawn from the Catholicon, Papias and the Vocabularius breviloquus (id. 1992: Annexe, 255). Many of the additions are linked to religion, which is not surprising, since the author intended his work primarily for use by preachers. This tendency is particularly noticeable in articles which retain Busa's traductive structure:

Busa 1507	VN 1511
Alexandria la cuitat de Egyptte et altres	Alexandria Une cite degypte dont est saincte Catherine
Acheldemach ager sanguis interpretatur	Acheldemach le champ qui fut acheté des deniers dont fut vendu dieu
Precurro corre davant	Precurro courir devant Iohannes precurrit citius Petro ut habetur in evangelio il alla devant saint Pirre

6.1.2. Vocabularius familiaris et compendiosus

It seems that the compiler of VN took large sections alternately from Busa and from VFC (in much the same way as the compiler of MPST took material alternately from Papias and the Catholicon), and combined them in second-letter alphabetical order. Exhibit 34 shows that articles beginning with 'Z' which are drawn from VFC tend to fall into three categories:

We have considered the possibility that the source of the articles in letter-section 'Z' might be an edition from Series 2 of the Catholicon abbreviatum,  [86] because of the close similarity of this section in VFC and Series 2 of the CA (see 4.1.2.). However, we have concluded that this explanation is unlikely since there is at least one instance in which the article in the VN corresponds to that in the VFC but not to that in the CA:

VFC	CA 1492	VN 1517
Zeb interpretatur lupus unde Zebe hostia lupi quam scilicet suffocavit	Zeb. interpretatur lupus	Zeb interpretatur lupus lou Zebe es. le sacrifice du lou ou de la beste quam scilicet suffocavit

6.1.3. Catholicon abbreviatum

There is one area, however, where it is possible that the CA made a modest contribution. Guillaume Le Moine, adapter of the series entitled Epithoma vocabulorum which was printed at Caen c.1529 by the firm of Michael Angier, concludes his title with a statement that he has added information about the gender of nouns and verbs (see 6.2.). Le Moine's method is to use a system of abbreviations set against the right-hand column margin. These are the same signs used in the CA and they are located in the same place (both the abbreviations and the position are inherited by the CA from Aalma).

A likely direct connection between the two dictionaries lies in the fact that Michael Angier printed an edition of the CA for Laurent Hostingue c.1511-1512 (see 4.2.19.). It is not unreasonable to suppose that Guillaume Le Moine had seen a copy of Angier's edition.

6.1.4. Dictionarium of Ambrogio Calepino

The Augustinian Ambrosius Calepinus, or Ambrogio Calepino (1440-1510) spent some thirty years writing his encyclopaedic Dictionarium (Labarre 1975: 7). It was first published at Reggio nell'Emilia in 1502, and more than two hundred editions of it were printed up to 1799. The Dictionarium's long life may be attributed to its later polyglot character. A large number of Latin versions printed in the early part of the sixteenth century already contained Greek equivalents for many Latin words; then, beginning in the 1540s, new languages were added, with some editions containing as many as eight languages. Depending on the country of publication, all modern European languages, as well as Greek and Hebrew, appeared in the Dictionarium at one time or another (id. 1975: 7).

The following exhibit compares some lemmata added by Le Moine to his Epithoma vocabulorum, with the same or similar words in Calepino:

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