Abstract for HiSoN 2017: Examining the Social in Historical Sociolinguistics: Methods and Theory, 6–7 April, New York, USA.
Anni Sairio, Samuli Kaislaniemi, and Terttu Nevalainen
University of Helsinki
Surveys of Early Modern English spelling have largely been based on printed and/or literary texts (Scragg 1974). The applicability of their results to manuscript and non-literary texts is questionable, and we know little about private spelling practices in the long term, such as how they influenced and were affected by spelling standardisation in the 16th–18th centuries.
Access to private spelling practices is hindered by the scarcity of philologically rigorous manuscript-based corpora; most corpora have been based on printed editions. The results of such "philological outsourcing" has enabled research on e.g. syntax and pragmatics, but not orthography, even when the source editions claim to have retained original manuscript spelling. This compromise has been accepted in order to create e.g. the 5.1m-word Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), consisting of 12,000 personal letters spanning the years 1400–1800.
The use of editions does not in fact preclude using a corpus for orthographical research, but there has been no simple way to determine the philological reliability of the edited text. This paper presents the work done in the STRATAS project to chart editorial practices in the c. 200 editions used in the CEEC (i.a. spelling, capitalisation, word division, abbreviations). What do editors state as their practices, and what have they actually done with their sources? The goal is to create a typology of editorial interference and assign editions a rating of orthographical reliability. This will make edited material accessible for orthographical analysis, and allow for new openings in historical linguistic research.
References
Scragg, D.G. 1974. A History of English Spelling. Manchester: Manchester UP.