Ring My Bells
Tintinnabulous: Pertaining to Bell Ringing
And a host of other tintinnabulous words!
Sometime around the year 1240AD, the French scholar Bartholomeus Anglicus (aka Bartholomew the Englishman) wrote what some might call one of the first general encyclopedias. It was called De Proprietatibus Rerum, meaning “On the Properties of Things.” I couldn’t find it online, but here you can see the titles of its 19 ambitious books covering god, the body, daily life, the sciences, and basically anything and everything known.
As you can tell from its title, the book was written in Latin, so our target word was not yet brought into English. That happened a century and a half later (~1398AD), when the British writer John Travisa translated Anglicu’ swork into English. Travisa is noted, by the way, in Wiki bio as the “the 18th most frequently cited author in the Oxford English Dictionary and the third most frequently cited source for the first evidence of a words.”
As we ring out the bells, as it were, in celebration of Travisa’s critical role in the development of English, we can perhaps use some tintinnabulous language. The original word he brought into English was tintinnabulum, a word for a small tinkling bell. The passage from Anglicus’ book read:
Tintinnabulum is the belle that is often hangyd abowte…
