Samnordisk tilgang til beskrivelsen af de nordiske middelaldersprog

In this short contribution I will try to illustrate how it is possible to write a common glossary for an anthology containing texts written in the four medieval Nordic languages: Old Danish, Old Swedish, Old Gutnish and Old West Norse. The reasons for this approach lie mainly in the didactic function of the work to which the glossary itself belongs. The target readers are mainly Italian students and scholars, who have a typically linguistic-philological background and are used to considering the ancient Nordic world as a single whole. Hence the need to bring the multiplicity of forms attested in the various languages to a single common form as lemmas in the glossary. We shall see that this operation will require a stance on several historical-linguistic questions. Furthermore, the creation of glossary headwords also involves the development of a normalized spelling system to represent them. In conclusion, the issues dealt with in this contribution constitute a starting point for a possible common descriptive grammar for all medieval Nordic languages.