5. Standardisation, exemplars, and the Auchinleck manuscript

Abstract

Samuels' 1963-article "Some applications of Middle English dialectology" situated the first steps in the formation of present-day Standard English in fourteenth-and fifteenth-century London, the home of three of his four incipient standards. The orthographic forms respectively selected by Scribes 1 and 3 of the Auchinleck manuscript, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, MS Advocates' 19.2.1, dated c. 1330-40, exemplify the earliest of the London-based types, Type II. This type dies out suddenly c. 1380 and is replaced by Type III, which in turn is equally suddenly replaced by Type IV half a century or so later. Samuels' four types have been influential; for example, Kane and Donaldson (1975) explicitly selected Cambridge University Library, MS B.15.17 as the base text for their edition of the B version of Piers Plowman on the grounds that it is written in Type III. The types have come under fire in recent years but they continue to prove resilient despite the complete absence of contributions countering the criticisms. For example, the types are unconditionally accepted in a textbook on manuscript studies focusing on the late Middle English period (Kerby-Fulton et al 2012: 67), go entirely unquestioned in a widely used undergraduate linguistics textbook (Horobin and Smith 2002), and are reproduced in as many as three of the fifteen chapters in a recent handbook on Middle English (Brinton and Bergs 2017), including in the chapter specifically devoted to standardisation. It is time to lay the types to rest.To fulfill this goal, this paper adds to the criticisms by questioning the basis for Type II. What follows details my methodology for orthographic analysis, which is able to discriminate the six scribes of the Auchinleck manuscript and the hands who produced the immediate exemplars. Relating how the exemplar hands are distributed to the manuscript's codicology strongly suggests the exemplars were obtained from local sources which also produced them. A later section discusses orthographic standardisation because there is evidence that the orthographic forms selected by Scribes 1 and 3 are no more similar than the forms selected by the manuscript's other scribes, contrary to what would be expected of a standard even at a very early stage in its formation. The final section summarises.

French lexis in the Auchinleck Manuscript: A digital-philological approach

“…Go ¨rlach, 1981;Wiggins, 2005;Putter et al, 2014). The most recent work on the book's language suggests that its main scribe worked with exemplars written in no more than four different hands, however (see Thaisen, 2020). On the manuscript's scribes, most recently, see Hanna (2016).…”

Philologist World of Texts: Festschrift in Honour of Professor Jeremy Smith

“…Irma Taavitsainen, for instance, casted doubts on the notion of a Wycliffte standard when she noticed the use of similar spellings in contemporary scientific texts; rather than investing Type I with a robust standard status, Taavitsainen believed that the secrecy in which the Lollard tracts circulated must have hindered their direct influence on scientific discourse and proposed that, if mutual influence existed, it must have worked the other way round, thus discarding the spread of normative variants associated with the Central Midlands (2000: 146). In a similar vein, other scholars have questioned empirically the graphemic consistency inherent in Type I (Peikola 2003: 32-40) and Type II (Thaisen 2020). As regards Type III, the study of The Language of the Chaucer Tradition by Simon Horobin (2003) has revealed an overrepresentation of Chaucerian manuscripts copied by a single person -"Chaucer's own scribe", Adam Pinkhurst (Smith 2008a: 205)-as well as the existence of more internal variation than expected of a true standard.…”

Network Diagrams as a Means of Comparing Spelling Systems

“…Besides building upon LAEME methodology, the rationale behind the Spelling database is conspicuously similar to the statistical language models developed by Jacob Thaisen (Thaisen, 2020), which also work with segments and treat spelling features independently of their presumed sound value. Thaisen's approach places more emphasis on quantification and employs more sophisticated statistical methods to calculate the level of similarity between two manuscripts.…”