Review of Cinato, Lahaussois & Whitman (2023): Glossing Practice: Comparative Perspectives

In his monumental encyclopaedia, the Etymologies, Isidore of Seville (c.560-646 CE) defined 'gloss' with reference to its etymological roots in the Greek word [glossa], meaning 'tongue' .A gloss, according to Isidore, "defines the utterance in question by means of one single word [verbum]: in one word it declares what a given thing is" (Etymologies, I. xxx.1, Isidore of Seville, 2006, p. 55).In his description, Isidore captured both the definitional and declarative purposes of a gloss; a gloss explains as well as interprets.The volume presently under review, Glossing Practice: Comparative Perspectives, picks up on Isidore's theme of the multivocal gloss by examining instances of glossing from a variety of periods and geographic areas.Through adopting a diachronic and cross-cultural comparative approach across three sections ("Comparative glossing practice", "Glosses as tools for access to knowledge" and "Glosses and linguistics"), the volume explores varied purposes of glosses in different contexts.By drawing parallels and examining divergences the contributors to the volume propose to offer new interpretations and perspectives on the purpose of glossing and its value.Chapter 1, "Continuity and Discontinuity: Glossing as a Dynamic System", the first of two chapters on "Comparative Glossing Practice", offers a thoughtprovoking survey of the development and purposes of the practice of glossing.The authors (Franck Cinato, Aime Lahaussois and John Whitman) take care to distinguish between a more generalised definition of what a gloss is -"small bits of discontinuous text"and to offer, instead, a narrower definition which informs the approach of this volume, namely that to qualify as a gloss, "the linguistic object must have a relation to/with a text" (p.10).Glosses, by this reading, should be analysed in terms of their relationship to the text (with regard to the function of the pairing of gloss and lemma) and with respect to their semantic content.The authors' narrow definition of what a gloss is, one that is inherently sensitive to the relationship between the gloss and its textual context, sits alongside their appraisal of glossing as a physical action.Glossing is the materialisation of an annotating practice, an action which itself merits study, perhaps even serving, as the authors tease, as "a universal cognitive behaviour" (p.22).