Abstract for ESTS 2017: Editorial Degrees of Intervention (14th annual conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship), 23–24 November, Alcalá de Henares, Spain.
Samuli Kaislaniemi and Anni Sairio
University of Helsinki
What do editors state as their practices, and what have they actually done with their sources? This paper charts editorial practices in 45 editions of Early Modern English letters.
The quickest way to compile a linguistic corpus of historical manuscript texts is to use texts already published in editions. The results of such “philological outsourcing” may be suitable for research on content, grammar, lexis and pragmatics, but not necessarily for orthography, punctuation, and layout, even when the editions used claim to have retained the original manuscript spelling. This compromise has nonetheless been accepted in order to create corpora such as the 5-million-word Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), consisting of 12,000 English personal letters spanning the years 1400–1800.
This paper presents the work of the ERRATAS project, which surveys the editions used in the CEEC, analysing the extent to which editors have changed aspects of the source manuscript texts. The survey charts both the editorial principles of each edition, and the actual practices as seen in the edited texts. Features examined include spelling, capitalization, word division and punctuation; abbreviations and special characters; and the editorial apparatus.
Studies of Early Modern English spelling have largely been based on printed and/or literary texts (Scragg 1974). The results of the ERRATAS survey will allow us to identify which spelling features in the editions have been reproduced faithfully, and thus enable the first diachronic survey of the history of English manuscript spelling.
Another aim of the project is to see if it is possible to create a typology of editorial interference, which could be used to assign editions a rating of orthographical reliability, and thus make edited manuscript texts accessible for orthographical analysis.
References
CEEC = Corpora of Early English Correspondence. Compiled by the CEEC project team under Terttu Nevalainen at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. <www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC>.
ERRATAS is part of the multidisciplinary project Interfacing Structured and Unstructured Data in Sociolinguistic Research on Language Change (STRATAS) at the University of Helsinki, Aalto University and the University of Tampere. <goo.gl/Wwk3Rp>.
Scragg, D.G. 1974. A History of English Spelling. Manchester: Manchester UP.