From Verbal and Visual Communication in Early English Texts, ed. by Matti Peikola, Aleksi Mäkilähde, Hanna Salmi, Mari-Liisa Varila and Janne Skaffari [Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 37]. Turnhout: Brepols.
Samuli Kaislaniemi
University of Helsinki
Although we still commonly use italics to mark foreign words or phrases, it is not generally known that this convention derives from historical typographical practices for textual highlighting, which in turn ultimately stem from medieval scribal traditions. Just as Tudor books printed in Black letter use Roman typeface to flag words and phrases, Early Modern English manuscripts written in Secretary script use Italic script for visual differentiation. In analogy of the term code-switching, I call this practice script-switching (typeface-switching in print).
Although visual highlighting is by definition distinctive, the linguistic aspects of script- and typeface-switching in Early Modern English texts remain largely uninvestigated. For instance, are they are relevant for code-switching studies? Can we use typeface-switching to determine code boundaries? Does the absence of typeface-switching indicate (fully) integrated borrowings? In turn, script-switching can also reveal information about scribal practices and linguistic competence: there were distinct ‘national’ scripts, such as English Secretary, French Secretary, and Spanish Italic, so being able to write a ‘foreign’ script implies knowledge of the language it indicates. The extent to which script and language correlate in mixed-language documents remains to be charted.
This study has three parts. Section 2 gives the historical background and explains the terminology used. Section 3 consists of two case studies: the first charts and analyses the use of code-switching and script-switching in a corpus of about one hundred letters written by an English merchant living in France 1603–1608; the second investigates code-switching and typeface-switching in the 1640s section of the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts. The results are then compared, and section 4 looks at the data more closely. Section 5 discusses the challenges of generalising based on the results, and concludes that much more work is needed on these practices in Early Modern English texts.