Abstract for ICEHL XXII (22nd International Conference on English Historical Linguistics), 3–6 July 2023, Sheffield, UK.
Samuli Kaislaniemi, University of Eastern Finland
Colin Greenstreet, MarineLives.org, Independent Scholar
Over the seventeenth century, English spelling standardized at an increasing pace. It is well known that print played a large part in these developments (see Condorelli 2022). What is less well known is how spelling standardization proceeded and developed in handwritten texts. A marked difference between private and public spelling practices continued through the eighteenth century and beyond (Osselton 1984; Salmon 1999), showing that spelling standardization overall was a much longer, drawn-out process, than results from EEBO queries might suggest.
This paper uses a new manuscript-based corpus to look at developments in English spelling by non-elite writers during the second half of the seventeenth century. We look at spelling features which became standardized in print during the period, such as <u/v>- and <i/j>-variation. The results are compared to findings from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), the Electronic Text Edition of Depositions (ETED), and the Salamanca Corpus for more data on handwritten texts, as well as EEBO for print.
This paper also showcases our new corpus. The Signs of Literacy from Manuscripts (SOLM) corpus consists of diplomatic transcripts of c.500 letters by some 200 non-elite English writers (c. 100,000 words), spanning 1640–1699. The corpus will be released in summer 2023 as Open Access.
The SOLM corpus draws on two linked occupational and economic communities for its letters. The writers in the corpus come from, first, marine occupations: captains, ships’ masters, pursers, boatswains, surgeons, carpenters, etc; and second, from those involved in the timber supply chain: surveyors and purveyors of timber, owners of wood wharfs, foresters, shipwrights, etc. The corpus comes with biographical information on writers (where available), including dates of birth and death, family background, education and occupation, enabling socio-economic analysis.
While the SOLM corpus is quite small, it helps fill a gap in available resources by making available letters from the lower literate sections of society. Letters by such writers have rarely been edited and published, and have thus largely evaded the attention of linguists. However, the SOLM corpus demonstrates that plenty of letters from lower social ranks in fact survive in easily accessible archival collections. All the letters in the corpus are sourced from two calendared and/or indexed series at the British National Archives: State Papers Domestic (SP 16, 18 and 29), and in-letters to the Admiralty (ADM 106).
CEEC = Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Compiled by the CEEC team led by Terttu Nevalainen at the University of Helsinki. varieng.helsinki.fi/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/index.html.
Condorelli, Marco. 2022. Standardising English Spelling: The Role of Printing in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century Graphemic Developments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
EEBO-TCP = Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/.
ETED = An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560-1760. Compiled by Merja Kytö, Peter J. Grund & Terry Walker. In Merja Kytö et al., Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011.
Osselton, Noel E. 1984. “Informal spelling systems in Early Modern English: 1500–1800”. In Norman F. Blake & Charles Jones (eds.), English Historical Linguistics. Studies in Development. Sheffield: Department of English Language, University of Sheffield, 123–137.
The Salamanca Corpus: Digital Archive of English Dialect Texts. Compiled the DING team at the University of Salamanca, 2011. www.thesalamancacorpus.com.
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.