Towards a Relativity of Spelling Change

Positional spelling redistribution: word-initial <u>/<v> and <i>/<j> in Early Modern English (1500–1700)

“…Preliminary, quantitative insights into spelling variation in EModE as a whole have described a reasonably consistent process of standardisation, which appears to have begun at the onset of the EModE era, and to have continued gradually and lineally to the nineteenth century (see Archer et al 2015: 9). As I have recently argued (Condorelli 2020b; see also Basu 2016: 173–4), however, the trends detected from these preliminary investigations may require some reconsideration, because historical standardisation in normalisation mechanisms tends to be conflated with modernisation (the latter being intended as ‘translation’ into present-day English). Spelling rarely morphed consistently and lineally from one historical stage to a final, ‘standardised’ form, but rather it followed a complex framework of internal regularities.…”

“…The final version of the vocabulary database thus contains more than four million individual lemmas and more than one billion word tokens in total 6 . The database covers the entire EModE period and represents the greatest majority of the historically reliable material transcribed to date (see also Condorelli 2020b). 7 The vocabulary database was tied to a search mechanism in a piece of software that aims to detect variation in spelling purely within and across historical texts 8 .…”

“…The results were also analysed so that validations would not be affected by issues related to ambiguity caused by homographs, homophones or foreign language material, according to the framework of analysis spelled out elsewhere (Condorelli 2020b), as a guideline for achieving high standards of precision. The analysis was aimed at ensuring that words like just , which could indicate an adverb or an adjective, would be validated correctly according to both lexical categories and their relative meanings using the vocabulary database, as both categories were represented in my corpus.…”

“… 8 Full acknowledgments and special thanks to Patrick Schultz and Elizabeth Esswein for parts of my methodology are provided in Condorelli 2020b.…”