Library › Latin: Grammar & Reference › De Aequivocis (Fragmentum)
This very short fragment comes from a verse work on equivocal words, words of the same form with different meanings, associated with John of Garland, the English grammarian and poet who taught in Paris in the thirteenth century. In a few hexameters it distinguishes the meanings of words such as augustus as the emperor’s name or the month, and augustus meaning augury; aura as favour, splendour, breeze and air; abacus as a table and the top of a column; and acus as a needle or pin, with its different genitives and genders.
Such verses were designed to be memorised by students learning Latin vocabulary and grammar, and John of Garland’s works of this kind were much used in the schools of the later Middle Ages. The fragment, though slight, shows the mnemonic technique and the concern with distinguishing homonyms that characterise medieval grammatical teaching. It is printed by Migne only as a specimen of the larger work.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 150, Parisiis 1854), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.