Abstract
This paper applies quantitative methods in palaeography. It develops tree-structured regression models of the palaeographical variation found in a synchronic corpus of texts written in orthographically less standardised late Middle English and establishes their accuracy. There are sixteen models, each one relating to a letter-shape known to distinguish the Gothic cursive scripts Anglicana and Secretary. The models predict the presence of the individual letter-shape from one or more of the following variables, in no particular order: (1) localisation of texts’ orthographic variation; (2) text-type; and (3) in-word position. The discussion asks why several Secretary letter-shapes cluster in documents localisable to County Durham and the area further north, given the script’s association with (a) institutions of national administration in the London-Westminster area and (b) orthographic standardisation. It concludes that the linguistics and the palaeography do not co-vary during this period in the history of the English language and suggests that it may illuminate studies of the gradient between Anglicana and Secretary to pay attention to provincial centres, not least Durham.
Acknowledgement:
The author acknowledges a residential fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He thanks Laura Wright, Kari Anne Rand, Muriel Norde, and the anonymous reviewers for this journal for their helpful comments, and also Merja Stenroos for access to photographic reproductions of the texts examined. He read the paper at the workshop devoted to “The Emergence of Standard English in Multilingual Britain”, University of Cambridge, 20–21 April 2017.
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© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Numerals in Lokono-Wayuunaiki: Reconstruction and implications for internal classification
- The trolley rumbled through the tunnel: On the history of the English Intransitive Motion Construction
- Sources of the Notabilia (1427), a medieval handwritten grammatical treatise from the Portuguese monastery of Alcobaça
- On causative dar and its alternatives in the history of Spanish
- Cherchez la femme: Two Germanic suffixes, one etymology
- Passives and Constructions that resemble passives
- A reconstruction of Proto-Kiranti verb roots
- Linguistic homoplasy and phylogeny reconstruction. The cases of Lezgian and Tsezic languages (North Caucasus)
- Secretary letter-shapes in County Durham
- Proto-Germanic ai in North and West Germanic
- A conceptual perspective of the evolution of Spanish frente from body part to locative/spatial concept and beyond
- Book Reviews
- Dalila Ayoun: The acquisition of the present
- Alexandra Beytenbrat: Case in Russian. A sign-oriented approach
- Uta Reinöhl: Grammaticalization and the rise of configurationality in Indo-Aryan
- Review
- IE3.com. Approaches to databases for Indo-European languages
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Numerals in Lokono-Wayuunaiki: Reconstruction and implications for internal classification
- The trolley rumbled through the tunnel: On the history of the English Intransitive Motion Construction
- Sources of the Notabilia (1427), a medieval handwritten grammatical treatise from the Portuguese monastery of Alcobaça
- On causative dar and its alternatives in the history of Spanish
- Cherchez la femme: Two Germanic suffixes, one etymology
- Passives and Constructions that resemble passives
- A reconstruction of Proto-Kiranti verb roots
- Linguistic homoplasy and phylogeny reconstruction. The cases of Lezgian and Tsezic languages (North Caucasus)
- Secretary letter-shapes in County Durham
- Proto-Germanic ai in North and West Germanic
- A conceptual perspective of the evolution of Spanish frente from body part to locative/spatial concept and beyond
- Book Reviews
- Dalila Ayoun: The acquisition of the present
- Alexandra Beytenbrat: Case in Russian. A sign-oriented approach
- Uta Reinöhl: Grammaticalization and the rise of configurationality in Indo-Aryan
- Review
- IE3.com. Approaches to databases for Indo-European languages