This chapter discusses the concept of distribution in historical handwritten and printed compositions understood in its widest sense, considering the text not only as a mere arrangement of the sentences and paragraphs on the pages, but also as the contribution of other elements associated with spacing in Late Middle English and Early Modern English. The first part of the chapter describes the rationale behind the composition of early English handwritten documents, reconsidering the formatting and the layout of the folios in the preparation of the writing surface, and assessing the use of columns, margins, ruling, number of lines and line justification. The main notions of the concept of spacing are then discussed, describing the different types of word division. Finally, two case studies are offered reconsidering the emerging of spacing in the Middle Ages and its development throughout Early Modern English, both in the middle and at the end of lines. The data used as source of evidence come from the Late Middle English and the Early Modern English components of The Málaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose and the scientific material of the Early English Books Online corpus together with other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific compositions.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between writing systems and language, which is never perfect, with the result that irregularities and idiosyncrasies arise even in writing systems that ostensibly have a one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and speech sound (or other unit of language). On the basis of a diverse assortment of examples drawn from around the world, this chapter outlines the ways in which writing systems are and are not systematic and discusses various avenues by which idiosyncrasies arise. The survey begins with a consideration of systematicity at the level of individual graphemes, where both aesthetic and functional aspects are discussed, and follows this with an exploration of the various degrees to which phonetic writing systems cover a language’s phonemic and subphonemic distinctions and where irregularities can arise. Issues of spelling and orthography, already interspersed in the first two parts, are the dedicated topic of the last section. At various points the chapter showcases the tension between desire for economy and efficiency and desire for regularity.

This chapter outlines some of the difficulties of studying orthography in fragmentary languages from Ancient Italy in the first millennium BC. The authors advocate for a multilevel approach to get the most information from short, challenging and (sometimes) poorly understood texts. The chapter includes a number of case studies from Republican Latin, Oscan, Umbrian and Venetic, highlighting the problems posed by different kinds of texts. For Latin, some grammarians provide relevant information about the perceived ‘standard’ language, but their points of view may not always reflect the usage of their contemporaries. Oscan is written using three main alphabets, which allows a comparison of orthographies and of the execution of spelling rules across different regions. The Iguvine Tables, written in Umbrian, are a long and detailed religious document, written by different individuals in a small group of priests, in two main phases, and show a number of orthographic practices specific to these documents. Finally, Venetic furnishes an example of how punctuation can be as important as spelling to a community’s orthographic practices.

This chapter reviews what we know about scribal practices of orthography (focusing on spelling), how their orthographies have been studied and interpreted, and where avenues of future research lie. It covers fundamental aspects of studying scribes, showing the multidisciplinary interest in scribes and providing a broad background for thinking about scribal variation in orthography. It discusses issues such as the term and concept of a scribe, the contexts in which scribes worked, and how the role of the scribe has changed over time. The chapter focuses on research concerning scribal orthographies within three broad contexts: studies focusing on phonology and phonetics but using scribal orthography as the source of information; research that concentrates on the intersection of phonology/phonetics and orthography; and studies that are interested in orthography as an exclusively or primarily written phenomenon. It also addresses the issue of orthographic standardization specifically, as scribes have been seen as central in this process, and touches on the various frameworks and approaches adopted for the study and interpretation of spelling regularization and standardization. Finally, the chapter points to some of the avenues open for new discoveries in the future.

This chapter discusses the relationship between spelling and writers’ social background, identifying how access to literacy and literacy practices in the history of English contributes to the spelling forms and conventions used in historical texts. It provides an overview of spelling and literacy in Old and Middle Englishes. Gender and social status inflect the spelling evidence from these periods, with the historical manuscripts largely representing the orthographic preferences of elite men, typically linked to religious houses or royal administration. More recent periods provide a broadening picture as access to literacy increases; nevertheless, when analyzing and interpreting historical spelling practices, it is important to recognize the potential skewing of any dataset. The chapter then surveys studies that have attempted to identify authorship on the basis of orthographic evidence. Citing examples from Shakespeare studies, it identifies the potential of this approach, and the need for caution when making pronouncements without an empirical baseline of spelling norms for a period. Finally, the chapter considers the relationship between gender and spelling in the history of English, highlighting negative social attitudes toward women’s spelling in a range of publications, and showing that claims made about women’s practices are not always borne out by empirical analysis.

This chapter presents current research demonstrating that orthographic variation does not only occur naturally in historical texts, but also shows systematic patterns and functional uses. Premodern orthographic systems are flexible and offer room for innovation. This is a decisive characteristic and an important precondition for orthographic variation and change. This chapter includes an overview of types and functions of historical orthographic variation and different processes of orthographic change on the basis of examples from the history of German and from runic writing. It aims, on the one hand, to give a general introduction to the topic, and, on the other hand, to discuss theoretical and methodological issues in the study of variation and change in historical orthography that provide a background against which a research question and design for the study of variation and change in historical orthographies can be defined.

This chapter explores various aspects and examples of analogy and extension, with particular attention to their interrelations. Analogy can be understood as an automatic cognitive process by which what is known is extrapolated to what is considered similar, which leads to similar outcomes, that is, extension. Later cognitive development usually prevents incorrect analogy. Extension following perceptual analogy in conventional semiotic systems produces changes in the system; instead of being interpreted as erroneous, it should be considered as a reflection of evolving human perception. Thus, semiotic systems generally evolve via extension generated by analogy, which can be illustrated by language and graphemics. Analogy between graphemic systems in contact may induce intergraphemic extension, and analogy between different categories of a given graphemic system may lead to intragraphemic extension. Because graphemic systems are related to language in many ways (for example, to elements of phonemic and morphemic systems), analogy concerning graphemics may produce intersemiotic extension, either from language to graphemics or in the opposite direction. The seemingly ideal synchronic correlation between graphemics and linguistic elements may have been caused by historical analogy and extension between them, and this evolution can be studied by diachronic analysis of language–writing relations.

This chapter discusses the notion of orthographic principles, the associated theoretical issues and the relevance of these principles in the (diachronic) study of spelling. It provides an overview of the aspects of writing that should be taken into consideration when identifying general patterns or rules governing spelling practices within a specific historic orthographic system, such as the typological make-up of the writing system, levels and regularity of linguistic representation, and graphotactic constraints. The discussion focuses on alphabet-based spelling systems and delineates several general pathways for the conventionalization of spelling across various European vernacular spellings systems at different historical periods, making particular illustrative use of Cyrillic Lithuanian. In addition to foregrounding the importance of sound-oriented and meaning-oriented graphic mappings in shaping alphabet-based spelling systems, this chapter emphasizes the role of graphotactic constraints, which have been central in contributing to morphographization of some European spelling systems in the early modern and late modern periods.

This chapter investigates the topic of orthographic reconstruction of a historical writing system taking as case study the Linear B syllabary of Bronze Age Greece. The Linear B syllabary was used to render the oldest Greek dialect attested in written form, so-called ‘Mycenaean’ Greek (c. 1400–1190 BC). The reader is guided step-by-step through the stages involved in the reconstruction of the orthography of the Linear B syllabary, so as to understand how to bridge the gap between actual attestations and their phonetic rendering (e.g. Linear B a-to-ro-qo representing alphabetic Greek ?????p?? /anthropos/ ‘man’). The discussion covers some of the methodological issues scholars had to reckon with when reconstructing a historical orthographic system in the Bronze Age Aegean context. This complex process eventually made it possible to draw up the ‘rules’ that govern the system and, by assessing deviations, to evaluate the extent to which these were adhered to. This chapter also illustrates the role played in such reconstruction by the historical and linguistic backdrop, within which the adaptation of an already existing writing system (‘Minoan’ Linear A) took place to render a linguistically different language (Greek).

This chapter provides a brief introduction to grapholinguistics, focusing mainly on its core subdisciplines – graphetics and graphematics (or graphemics). Historically, grapholinguistics can be perceived as a neglected subdiscipline of linguistics, though it also explores the topic of written language in its totality, which is not entirely linguistically oriented. The author specifies that its beginnings, as an organized movement, date back to Germany of the 1970s, but various instances of grapholinguistics emerged at different places (and in different languages). The field now has an established textbook, a special section in the online Dictionaries of Linguistics and Communication Science, and, as of quite recently, a proposal for a unifying general theory. This chapter is centered on graphetics and graphematics in order to expose the crucial linguistic dichotomy – that between form and function. Whereas the primary concern of graphetics is the materiality of writing, graphematics deals mainly with the functions of abstract units. The interplay between these two interrelated grapholinguistic subdisciplines is especially evident in the analysis of allography, which focuses on the variation of both concrete and abstract units (graphs and graphemes, respectively).

The goal of his chapter is twofold: firstly, to provide a general review of the literature on language contact and orthography, with a special focus on how situations of language contact can bring about alternation or conflict among various spelling traditions, and spearhead the emergence of new orthographic standards; and secondly, to explore how a historical sociolinguistic approach can contribute to the study of historical orthographies in language contact situations. Specifically, the chapter tests the possibilities of an ecological framework to the study of historical orthographies in contact settings, by considering spelling norms as a reflection of multiple, simultaneous linguistic and cultural environmental forces. This framework is illustrated in the second half of the chapter by means of a case study of the emergence of orthographic norms in a high-contact environment, namely the development of spelling protocols in colonial Nahuatl and the application of these protocols to Spanish loanwords containing sibilants. This case study exemplifies the interface between linguistic, social and cultural effects typical of language contact environments, and illustrates the affordances of an ecological approach to the study of historical orthographies and orthographic normativization in other contact settings.

This chapter formulates some relatively new lines of enquiry for research in historical orthography, which stem from the concept of a community of practice. The authors propose the idea that communities of practice represent a key bridge across material which inevitably stimulates divergent research interests in the field. They suggest that communities of book producers in England and the Low Countries were not self-standing entities, but were engaged in more or less loose, professional and social interactions, forming networks of practice. The respective histories of English and Dutch had some fundamental similarities with reference to early book production and local organization, and there were links existing even between those working on manuscripts and printed material. This chapter provides useful background information on early book production and large-scale professional networks, with a view to inspiring future researchers to explore the intricate correlation between professional organization, culture and society in the complex framework of early modern Europe.

This chapter draws on the comparative and sociopragmatic methods in historical orthography research. After first introducing writing systems and describing orthography as a supportive discipline on the fringes of other disciplines, the growing interest in this discipline is explained. The chapter presents the adoption of the comparative method in Slavic studies and principal directions therein. Then, it summarizes theoretical preliminaries in historical sociopragmatics, primarily based upon research on English historical orthography. In what follows, the author offers an overview of the most important approaches in Slavic studies, pragmaphilology and diachronic pragmatics, illustrating the differences and synergies between them mostly with Russian, Czech and Polish material. Finally, the methods proposed are critically appraised and their applicability for prospective research is demonstrated.

In this chapter, Gijsbert Rutten, Iris Van de Voorde and Rik Vosters, refine the Labovian distinction based primarily on the type of language learning involved by bringing in the contact-based insights of Milroy (2007) on this issue. Exploring the extent to which the transmission-diffusion distinction can also apply to orthographic, rather than phonological or morphosyntactic, changes, the authors discuss a range of different examples of both transmission and – various subtypes of – diffusion, mostly from Dutch, German and English. Their central argument is that diffusion must be seen as the dominant driver of orthographic change, but transmission-type changes are also possible in specific historical contexts, for instance in relation to explicit instruction in schools or in closely-knit social networks. Building on different examples and cases, the chapter also explains the link between diffusion and supralocalization, as local and regional spelling practices in medieval times give way to more supraregional writing traditions in postmedieval times. As such, these processes of geographical diffusion of innovations across communities often lay the ground work for later standardization efforts. However, by discussing a slightly more elaborate case study on spelling change and pluricentricity in Dutch language history, the authors show how the development of such supraregional writing traditions often leads not only to linguistic standardization, but also results in a linguistic landscape which can best be described as pluricentric, consisting of different national and regional normative centers from which innovations spread.

This chapter gives a presentation of writing and literacy in Norway from the first runic inscriptions until the present day, choosing certain phenomena and certain texts to exemplify the development. Where possible, the author has taken the viewpoint of the writers. The aspects discussed include the relationship between orthography and alphabets, the understanding of orthographic use in the light of reading preferences, and the importance of political ideas of nationality and democracy for the codification of the two written standards that are used today. Language-external factors had a major impact on the changes concerning writing in Norway. For example, the introduction of the Latin alphabet led to great changes in the runic literacy, and the Black Death caused a general decline in the learned literacy. Later, the political union between Denmark and Norway led to a common, Dano-Norwegian written language. Between 1750 and 1850 this common language was standardized, and variation was less noticeable in the sources. After 1850 a Norwegian Ausbau process started, and variation, with two standards and several dialects, became a trade mark of Norwegian writing, which it still is.