New Methods of Bringing Image Data into Historical Linguistics: A Case Study with Medical Writing 1500–1700

9. Abbreviations and standardisation in the Polychronicon: Latin to English and manuscript to print

“…Less clear is how directly a linguistics of speech approach can be applied to writing systems and orthographic features. Abbreviations, in particular, are an interesting orthographic feature: On the one hand, they are a device developed to save time and space (Petti 1977: 22) and can thus be expected to be conditioned by the physical properties of the hand-written and printed space (Varila 2016;Shute 2017a;Tyrkkö 2017). On the other hand, they are legitimate spelling variants of their own that were part of the pool of variants available to writers of Middle and Early Modern English (Lass 2004;Driscoll 2009;Rogos 2012).…”