Tales of the 1001 nists: the phonological implications of litteral substitution sets in some thirteenth-century South-West Midland texts

Laing, Margaret; Lass, Roger

doi:10.1017/s1360674303001102

Cited by 29 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…It continues a series of studies on early Middle English writing systems (Laing 1999(Laing , 2008Laing & Lass 2003, 2005. 3 Even most modern so-called 'standard' systems have 1 These observations arise from detailed analytical work on early Middle English manuscript texts being undertaken at the Institute for Historical Dialectology, Linguistics and English Language, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh towards the compilation of A linguistic atlas of early Middle English (LAEME).…”

Section: Litteral and Potestatic 2 Substitution Setsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Shape-shifting, sound-change and the genesis of prodigal writing systems

Laing¹,

Lass²

2009

English Language and Linguistics

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In a series of articles we have looked at individual early Middle English writing systems and explored aspects of multivocal sound/symbol and symbol/sound relationships. This article combines previous observations with new material, and provides insights into the genesis of these relations and how they may interconnect. Since many early Middle English texts survive as copies, not originals, they may give clues to the orthographic systems of their exemplars too.We investigate the 'extensibility' of Litteral and Potestatic Substitution Sets. Writing systems may be economical or prodigal. The 'ideal' economical system would map into a broad phonetic or a phonemic transcription: that is, one 'sound', one symbol. In early Middle English there is no one standard written norm, so there is potentially less restraint on diversity than in standard systems. Further extensibility is built into the system. We show that much of what tends to be dismissed as 'scribal error' rather represents writing praxis no longer familiar to us -flexible matrices of substitution and variation.South of a line running roughly from the Mersey to the Wash, but excluding much of East Anglia, the distinction [between the functions of 'fl' and 'y'] was regularly maintained; north of this line, and also over much of East Anglia, 'fl' and 'y' were represented by the same (usually y-like) symbol. (LALME 3: xv) The figurae and may sometimes appear as end points of a cline: there is no systematic functional distinction made between -shaped, -shaped or formally indeterminate figurae, however many actual shapes the scribe employs (Benskin 1982: 14).There are therefore four types of scribal praxis in relation to 'fl' and 'y':(a) 'southern' / differentiation both in shape and function;b) 'northern' confusion where a single figura, usually -shaped but sometimes -shaped is used for both [T∼D] and [i∼j]; 4 4 The phonetic representation [i] stands for [i(:)], et passim.

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Section: Litteral and Potestatic 2 Substitution Setsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Shape-shifting, sound-change and the genesis of prodigal writing systems

Laing¹,

Lass²

2009

English Language and Linguistics

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“…The framework within which we analyse spelling variation and its phonic significance is based around the taxonomic notion of the littera (Laing 1999, Laing and Lass 2003, 2005, 2009Laing 2010, 2012). 5 This concept originates in an antique and medieval understanding of writing systems (Donatus, Ars Maior), which brings together several layers of interpretation of the "markings" on the page.…”

Section: A Grapho-phonological Unit: Layers Of Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The FITS project also seeks to outline the diachronic dimension of sound change, as reflected in variant spellings. This aspect falls outside the scope of the present paper.5 For a detailed discussion of the littera as applied to medieval English manuscripts, see especiallyLaing (1999) andLaing and Lass (2003). These authors draw inspiration fromBenediktsson's (1972) discussion of medieval orthographic theory and use the notation developed byBenskin (1997) for litterae (graphemes), potestates (sound values) and figurae (allographs).…”

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Towards a grapho-phonologically parsed corpus of medieval Scots: database design and technical solutions

Kopaczyk

Molineaux

Karaiskos³

et al. 2018

Corpora

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This paper presents a newly constructed corpus of sound-to-spelling mappings in medieval Scots, which stems from the work of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) project. We have developed a systematic approach to the relationships between individual spellings and proposed sound values, and recorded these mutual links in a relational database. In this paper, we introduce the theoretical underpinnings of sound-to-spelling and spelling-to-sound mappings, and show how a Scots root morpheme undergoes grapho-phonological parsing, the analytical procedure that is employed to break down spelling sequences into sound units. We explain the data collection and annotation for the FITS Corpus (Alcorn et al., forthcoming), drawing attention to the extensive meta-data which accompany each analysed unit of spelling and sound. The database records grammatical and lexical information about the root, the positional arrangement of segments within the root, labels for the nuclei, vowels and consonants, the morphological context, and extra-linguistic detail of the text a given root was taken from (date, place and text type). With this wealth of information, the FITS corpus is capable of answering complex queries about the sound and spelling systems of medieval Scots. We also suggest how our methodology can be transferred to other non-standardised spelling systems.

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“…Phonetic and orthographic remappings between Old English and Middle English led to the availability, in a text community of multilingual scribes, of multiple orthographic variants to realise certain sounds. Conversely, multiple sounds could be mapped onto a single littera (see further Laing 1999;Laing & Lass 2003, 2009. In CoNE, we use the code ([LS]) as a catchall term to indicate non-traditional use of a littera as the result of the presence of one or more Litteral Substitution Sets in a scribe's system.…”

Section: Litteral Substitutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The early Middle English reflexes of Germanic *ik ‘I’: Unpacking the changes

Laing

Lass

2013

Folia Linguistica Historica

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The phonological shape of the PDE first-person nominative singular pronoun 'I' is assumed to have a simple history. The final consonant of WGmc *ik 'palatalises' (i.e. fronts and assibilates), and later drops, yielding [iː], which develops through the Great Vowel Shift into something like [ai]. However, the late Old English and early Middle English evidence indicates that such a simple narrative does not match the attested data. Rather, there are significant temporal, geographical and variational aspects, including complex lexical diffusion. The Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, Corpus of Tagged of Texts contains 145 texts that include one or more variants of the pronoun 'I'. Between them, they exemplify an intricate history. In this article we unpack the changes that have brought about the attested complexity. As a basis we use the etymology of this item created for the recently published Corpus of Narrative Etymologies (CoNE), which itself interfaces with its accompanying Corpus of Changes (CC). The history of this small grammatical word ultimately needs to be considered against the wider background of velar palatalisation in general and in relation to the reflexes of other commonly occurring items of a similar structure. But the changes visible in 'I' seem not to be fully replicated in any of them, and here we confine ourselves to its particular and apparently unique history.

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Tales of the 1001 nists: the phonological implications of litteral substitution sets in some thirteenth-century South-West Midland texts

Cited by 29 publications

References 2 publications

Shape-shifting, sound-change and the genesis of prodigal writing systems

Shape-shifting, sound-change and the genesis of prodigal writing systems

Towards a grapho-phonologically parsed corpus of medieval Scots: database design and technical solutions

The early Middle English reflexes of Germanic *ik ‘I’: Unpacking the changes

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