Abstract for ICEHL XX (20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics), 27–30 August 2018, Edinburgh, UK.
Samuli Kaislaniemi & Anni Sairio
University of Helsinki
Our understanding of Early Modern English spelling is largely based on printed sources (Scragg 1974; Salmon 1999). Although studies have shown that the range of variation in hand-written sources greatly surpasses that found in print (Osselton 1984; Sönmez 1993), the lack of suitable resources has hindered large-scale and diachronic studies. This paper uses the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) to look at variation and change in spelling in Early Modern English letters. It shows that there are two ways of countering potential editorial interference which may reduce the reliability of results from edition-based historical corpora. One method is to focus on frequent variables, and to use smaller, manuscript-based corpora to verify the findings. Although editions of Early Modern English text have usually modernized <u/v>-variation (changing common spellings such as haue, vp into “have, up”), it is rarer for them to have modernized other highly frequent spelling variants, such as doubled or singled consonants (at, att; shall, shal), or long vowels (beleve, beleeve, beleive, believe) (Kaislaniemi et al. 2017).
The other method is to analyse the philological reliability of the sources of a historical corpus, and to use only texts which reproduce the spelling variation found in the source manuscripts. This requires the manual vetting of editions. Our approach has been to create a database of the textual features charted, which can then be turned into corpus metadata (Sairio et al. 2018).
Preliminary results show that both approaches can be fruitfully used to reveal new findings in the history of English private spelling practices. Moreover, search results from the CEEC can be divided according to social variables such as the writer’s age, gender or domicile, allowing for an initial survey of regional variation in private spelling practices.
References
CEEC = Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Compiled by the CEEC project team under Terttu Nevalainen at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. See <www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC>.
EEBO-TCP = Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. Phase II texts available to subscribers only. <www.textcreationpartnership.org>.
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Osselton, N. E. 1984. “Informal spelling systems in Early Modern English: 1500-1800”. In N. F. Blake & Charles Jones (eds.), English Historical Linguistics. Studies in Development. Sheffield: Department of English Language, University of Sheffield. 123–137.
Sairio, Anni, Samuli Kaislaniemi, Anna Merikallio & Terttu Nevalainen. 2018. “Charting orthographical reliability in a corpus of English historical letters”. ICAME Journal 42: 79–96. DOI: doi.org/10.1515/icame-2018-0005.
Salmon, Vivian. 1999. “Orthography and punctuation 1476–1776”. In Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 3, 1476–1776. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 13–55.
Scragg, D. G. 1974. A History of English Spelling. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Sönmez, Margaret. 1993. English Spelling in the Seventeenth Century: A study of the nature of standardisation as seen through the MS and printed versions of the Duke of Newcastle's "A New Method …". PhD Thesis, University of Durham.