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Part of
Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
Edited by Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 7] 2017
► pp. 187–213

“A graphic system which leads its own linguistic life”?

Epistolary spelling in English, 1400–1800

| University of Helsinki
| University of Helsinki

Traditional accounts of the history of English spelling are primarily based on printed texts. According to them, English orthography developed from great diversity in Late Middle English to modern standard spelling by 1800. Studies have also revealed a split between public and private spelling practices. This paper charts the history of epistolary spelling in Early Modern English using the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. We counter potential editorial interference in the corpus by two methods. First, we focus on frequent variables; and second, we use smaller, manuscript-based resources to verify our findings. The results reveal, for the first time, long-term trends in the history of English private spelling.

Keywords: historical corpora, corpus linguistics, Early Modern English, Late Modern English, letter-writing, orthography, spelling, standardisation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Materials and methods
  • 3.Consonant variation: <l> vs. <ll>
    • 3.1 always
    • 3.2-ful
  • 4.Vowel variation: <ei> vs. <ie>
    • 4.1 friend
    • 4.2 believe
    • 4.3 receive
  • 5.The standardisation of epistolary spelling
    • 5.1Idiolectal variation dominates in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
    • 5.2Generational change in the seventeenth century
    • 5.3Emerging standards in the eighteenth century
  • 6.Conclusions
    • 6.1On the reliability of CEEC for research on spelling
    • 6.2Overlapping waves of change
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.7.08kai
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