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

Kopaczyk, Joanna; Molineaux, Benjamin; Karaiskos, Vasileios; Alcorn, Rhona; Los, Bettelou; Maguire, Warren

doi:10.3366/cor.2018.0146

Cited by 6 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 11 publications

(6 reference statements)

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“…As part of an extensive study of the phonological structure of Older Scots and its orthographic manifestations, we have developed a technique of grapho-phonological parsing (Kopaczyk et al 2018), which we have applied to the Germanic lexis in the corpus of 1200 texts written in Scots between 1380 and 1500 underpinning A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS, Williamson 2008). Our technique resolves each form of each morpheme into a sequence of spelling units.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Charting the rise and demise of a phonotactically motivated change in Scots

et al. 2019

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Although Old English [f] and [v] are represented unambiguously in Older Scots orthography by <f> and <v> (or <u>) in initial and morpheme-internal position, in morpheme-final position <f> and <v>/<u> appear to be used interchangeably for both of these Old English sounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between the spellings and the etymologically expected consonant. This paper explores these spellings using a substantial database of Older Scots texts, which have been grapho-phonologically parsed as part of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) project. Three explanations are explored for this apparent mismatch: (1) it was a spelling-only change; (2) there was a near merger of /f/ and /v/ in Older Scots; (3) final [v] devoiced in (pre-)Older Scots but this has subsequently been reversed. A close analysis of the data suggests that the Old English phonotactic constraint against final voiced fricatives survived into the pre-Literary Scots period, leading to automatic devoicing of any fricative that appeared in word-final position (a version of Hypothesis 3), and this, interacting with final schwa loss, gave rise to the complex patterns of variation we see in the Older Scots data. Thus, the devoicing of [v] in final position was not just a phonetically natural sound change, but also one driven by a pre-existing phonotactic constraint in the language. This paper provides evidence for the active role of phonotactic constraints in the development of sound changes, suggesting that phonotactic constraints are not necessarily at the mercy of the changes which conflict with them, but can be involved in the direction of sound change themselves.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Charting the rise and demise of a phonotactically motivated change in Scots

et al. 2019

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“…Our analysis of spelling variation in OSc materials relies on the well-established view that medieval scribal practices are overwhelmingly systematic as regards their graphemic repertoires, graphotactic distributions, and spelling-to-sound mappings (see Laing 1999, Laing & Lass 2003, 2009, Kopaczyk et al 2018. This said, non-standard spelling systems may use a variety of graphs in order to represent a single sound and those same graphic elements may be used for multiple sounds as well.…”

Section: Fits and Grapho-phonological Parsingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To this end, our analysis relies on the c.1,250 local documentsc.400k wordscontained in A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS 2008), dated between 1380 and 1500. These materials were accessed via the From Inglis to Scots corpus (FITS; Alcorn et al forthcoming), which provides a grapho-phonologically parsed version of the Germanic root elements in LAOS (see Kopaczyk et al 2018), facilitating a triangulation of spellings, reconstructed sounds, etymological origins and texts. Crucially, this allows us to map detailed spelling repertoires onto reconstructed sound values, and see how these are distributed over time and space.…”

Section: Fits and Grapho-phonological Parsingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonotactics, graphotactics and contrast: the history of Scots dental fricative spellings

Molineaux¹,

Kopaczyk²,

Alcorn³

et al. 2020

English Language and Linguistics

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The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations (<þ>, <ð>, <y> and <th>, among others) eventually settled on one digraph, <th>, for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. <f> vs <v> and <s> vs <z>) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by <y> and /θ/ by <th> (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively <th> (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where <y> progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while <th> recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for <þ> and <ð> via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes.

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“…Ultimately, each sound (or phone) in medieval spelling could have several spellings -a spelling substitution set -and, vice-versa, each spelling unit (or grapheme) could be used to represent multiple phones -a sound substitution set (cf. [Laing, 1999], [Laing and Lass, 2003], [Kopaczyk et al, 2018]). Figure 2 gives example visualisations of such sets, based on the data in the From Inglis To Scots Corpus ([FITS, forthcoming]), a unique resource for exploring nonstandard spelling practices.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualising pre-standard spelling practice: Understanding the interchange of ‹ch(t)› and ‹th(t)› in Older Scots

Molineaux

Maguire

Karaiskos

et al. 2020

Journal of Data Mining &Amp; Digital Humanities

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International audience Alphabetic spelling systems rarely display perfectly consistent one-to-one relationships between graphic marks and speech sounds. This is particularly true for languages without a standard written form. Nevertheless, such non-standard spelling systems are far from being anarchic, as they take on a conventional structure resulting from shared communities and histories of practice. Elucidating said structure can be a substantial challenge for researchers presented with textual evidence alone, since attested variation may represent differences in sound structure as well as differences in the graphophonological mapping itself. In order to tease apart these factors, we present a tool-Medusa-that allows users to create visual representations of the relationship between sounds and spellings (sound substitution sets and spelling substitution sets). Our case study for the tool deals with a longstanding issue in the historical record of mediaeval Scots, where word-final <cht>, <ch>, <tht> and <th> appear to be interchangeable, despite representing reflexes of distinct pre-Scots sounds: [x], [xt] and [θ]. Focusing on the documentary record in the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots ([LAOS, 2013]), our exploration surveys key graphemic categories, mapping their lexical distributions and taking us through evidence from etymology, phonological typology, palaeography and historical orthograpy. The result is a novel reconstruction of the underlying sound values for each one of the target items in the record, alongside a series of sound and spelling changes that account for the data.

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

Cited by 6 publications

References 11 publications

Charting the rise and demise of a phonotactically motivated change in Scots

Charting the rise and demise of a phonotactically motivated change in Scots

Phonotactics, graphotactics and contrast: the history of Scots dental fricative spellings

Visualising pre-standard spelling practice: Understanding the interchange of ‹ch(t)› and ‹th(t)› in Older Scots

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