Abstract for HiSoN 2023 (12th Historical Sociolinguistics Network Conference): Language histories from above and from below, 31 May–2 June 2023, Brussels, Belgium
Samuli Kaislaniemi, University of Eastern Finland
Colin Greenstreet, MarineLives.org, Independent Scholar
This paper introduces a new Open Access resource, the SOLM corpus of letters from non-elite members of the English maritime community. The corpus spans 1640–1699, and at completion will contain some 500 letters for c.100,000 words. We aim to release the SOLM corpus in summer 2023.
The SOLM corpus was compiled for four purposes. The linguistic motivation behind it is to gain new material to study the standardisation of spelling in Early Modern English. For instance, over the 17th century, <u/v>-variation effectively disappeared from printed texts, yet such spelling practices survived well into the 18th century in manuscripts. It has been difficult to study <u/v>-variation in letters in particular, as the only historical corpus suited for sociolinguistic analysis, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), is compiled from editions – almost all of which modernize <u/v> variation as a matter of course.
Secondly, the SOLM corpus extends the materials available to study literacy among non-elite social groups. The surviving written record is generally not considered to be representative of the full breadth of literacy that existed in early modern English society. Indeed, 17th-century England was permeated with paperwork, much of it produced and consumed by less educated social ranks, such as those involved in building and supplying ships: foresters and timber merchants, storekeepers and shipwrights; as well as petty officers aboard ships, such as pursers and ships’ masters. The SOLM corpus makes some 500 of their letters available to researchers interested in the middling and lower social ranks of 17th-century England. In order to facilitate sociolinguistic and sociohistorical research, background information on the writers is provided as part of the corpus.
Thirdly, the SOLM corpus was built as proof of concept in how to access such written records. Documents produced by lower social ranks in the early modern period survive in surprising abundance, effectively hiding in plain sight among the British State Papers, but also in large collections that have been less accessible, such as the in-letters of the Navy Board. Using these large and well-known collections, it was possible to create this 100,000-word corpus in some six months. There is plenty more similar material available in the British National Archives.
In this paper, after describing the corpus, we use spelling in SOLM as a test case to study language ‘from below’, looking at cases like <u/v>-variation and capitalisation. We compare our results to those drawn from comparable corpora, such as CEEC (letters) and An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (manuscript-based). These results from corpora of handwritten texts are then compared to data from printed texts, EEBO-TCP, with a focus on how features becoming standardized in print were treated in manuscripts.
References
Corpus of Early English Correspondence. varieng.helsinki.fi/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/index.html.
EEBO-TCP = Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/.
An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560-1760. 2011. In Merja Kytö, Peter J. Grund and Terry Walker, Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.