A posteriori

GREAT DIONYSIA: See Dionysia.

GREAT VOWEL SHIFT: A remarkable change in the pronunciation of English, thought to have occurred largely between 1400 and 1450. Much of Middle English poetry (including all the works of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Pearl Poet) was written before the Great Vowel Shift took place, and thus it should be pronounced differently than Modern English. In scholarly parlance, the Great Vowel Shift is usually referred to by its initials as GVS. Click here for more information.

GRIMM'S LAW: A formulation or rule of thumb for tracing a language-shift in the Germanic branch of proto-Indo-European, i.e., the way certain consonants changed in the western or centum subfamily. The term comes from Jakob Grimm (the same scholar who with his brother collected the folktales in Grimm's Fairy Tales). Click here for specific information.

GRISAILLE: Kathleen Scott tells us that, in the elaborate medieval artwork found in illuminated manuscripts, grisaille refers to "decorative work or illustrative scenes rendered mainly in shades of grey or muted brown; in English 15th-century illustration, often in combination with colours or gold, i.e., figures in a monochrome tone against a coloured background; not common in 15th-century English book illustration" (Scott 372). It is, however, more commmon in continental manuscripts.

GROUNDLINGS: While the upper class paid two pennies to sit in the raised area with seats, and some nobles paid three pennies to sit in the Lords' rooms, the majority of viewers who watched Shakespeare's plays were called groundlings or understanders. They paid a single penny for admission to the ground level in the yard of the Globe theatre and remained standing for the entire play (often up to four hours in length). The word groundlings for such audience members first appears in Hamlet. From this and other contexts, it appears that the groundlings were boisterous and not very bright, with a pension for eating nuts and throwing the shells at the actors on stage. (Contrast with the wealthy observers in the lords' rooms.)

GROUP GENITIVE: A genitive construction in which the 's appears at the end of a phrase modifying a word rather than the head or beginning of a phrase. For instance, "the applicant who lives in New York's resume arrived today." Here, the word applicant in red is the actual possessor of the resume, but because the long phrase who lives in New York appears between it and the possessed object (the resume), most English speaker's take the possessive marker and attach it to the proper noun New York. Collectively, this formation is a group genitive.

GRUE LANGUAGE: In linguistic anthropology, any language using a single word to describe both the hue of green and the hue of blue simultaneously is called a "grue" language. An example is Welsh, in which the word gwyrdd (pronounced goo-irrth) is a general term for green, but the word glas can accomodate both blue and all shades of green (which is why the word for grass in Welsh literally translates as "blue straw"). One theory suggests any ethnic groups living in mountainous or equatorial areas will tend to speak grue languages because the stronger UV radiation in these locations causes the lens of the eye to yellow gradually, eventually making the eye less capable of perceiving short wavelenths (i.e. blue and green) in the spectrum. Such people arguably have a harder time distinguishing minor variations in color between blue and green, and hence use only one word to describe both hues.

GUILD: A medieval organization that combined the qualities of a union, a vocational school, a trading corporation, and product regulations committee for the bourgeoisie. These associations of merchants, artisans, and craftsmen rose in power and numbers toward the late medieval period. Click here for an expanded discussion of guilds.

GUIOT MANUSCRIPT, THE: Technically referred to as MS Bibliothèque Nationale f. fr. 794, this mid-thirteenth-century manuscript is the most important document containing Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian romances after the so-called Annonay Manuscript was destroyed in the eighteenth-century.

GUSTATORY IMAGERY: Imagery dealing with taste. This is opposed to visual imagery, dealing with sight, auditory imagery, dealing with sound, tactile imagery, dealing with touch, and olfactory imagery, dealing with scent. See imagery.