This chapter sketches the history of philology and charts its use as a method for analyzing and understanding orthographic variation. Its chronological arrangement spans the discipline’s development, from the roots of philology in the Classical period to present-day incarnations of the approach. Such incarnations have seen philology move from its use as a tool which sought to make sense of orthographic variation in order to facilitate textual editing, to one which, combined with newer theoretical linguistic approaches, gave rise to disciplines such as historical sociolinguistics or pragmaphilology, where extralinguistic contexts are brought to bear on linguistic data. The authors present two case studies exemplifying contemporary philological approaches to historical orthography. The first one uses a manuscript-centered methodology to illustrate the contrasting copying-practices of two scribes working on the Tanner version of the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica. The second one focuses on the scripting of /w/ in Old English and Old High German and demonstrates how an etymological sound reference system can be employed for graphemic analysis.

The authors define the basic elements of writing and writing systems: graphemic units (graphemes and allographs), graphetic units (letters and graphs) and typographical units (glyphs and characters). Starting with graphemes, they introduce and discuss different definitions of graphemes proposed in the pertinent literature and then tackle the question of the distribution of graphemes in a given writing system and elaborate on the concept of allography. Regarding graphetic units, the authors focus on the internal structure of letters and other graphs and introduce the concept of the ‘length hierarchy’ of letters, which leads to a discussion of larger graphemic categories, especially the graphemic syllable. Looking more deeply at the functional distribution of letters, they address the question of graphemic inventories and their development. Their discussion also includes the typographical key concepts of glyphs and characters. The chapter then focuses on the graphemic subinventory of punctuation, the form of punctuation marks, as well as their decoding and encoding functions. The final issue discussed is capitalization as the functional differentiation between uppercase and lowercase, including the development of different functions of uppercase letters in the history of the European writing systems.

This chapter explores the connections of orthography to paleography and codicology, and the dependence of historical orthography on the materiality of writing and printing environments. It explains that orthography is one of the tools of paleographers, and a key to understanding (deciphering) the written language of ancient and medieval texts, whereas codicologists investigate nonlinguistic (and nonorthographic) peculiarities of early manuscript books (codices). Orthographic research, however, in some cases helps estimate more precisely the origins of codices (time and location). The chapter also presents some of the ways in which the materiality of writing and printing historically has directed the development of orthographic features (e.g. symmetricity of upper and lower cases, dependence on the limitations of printers’ type sets). The author introduces the dichotomy between the perceived durability and perishability of a text at its creation phase, and reveals its impact on the differentiation of orthographic approaches such as the historical simultaneous double orthographies of various European languages (i.e. printed versus handwritten manuscripts, books versus newspapers).

This chapter offers an overview of selected linguistic approaches to writing and writing systems, mainly to alphabetic orthographies, with special emphasis on the English language. The survey starts with the ancient views on the relationship between speech and writing, as they constitute the foundation of premodern and modern perspectives. Since the debate between the relational and autonomistic approaches took several decades in the twentieth century, an important part of the chapter covers their main tenets and representatives. The author argues that, over time, one can observe growing convergence between the previously opposite perspectives, which testifies to the increase in the awareness of the complexity of interrelations between alphabetic writing systems and the other language subsystems. Eventually, scholars, especially those focusing on English in their research, have widened their interest in writing systems to a variety of extralinguistic aspects interrelated with the patterns of orthographic variation. These interrelations are presented and illustrated in the last part of the chapter, which is devoted to the historical sociolinguistic approach.

This chapter addresses the study of orthography from a sociopolitical historical perspective, including a literature review and a case study focused on the politics of spelling in mid-nineteenth-century Spain. Scholars working with a sociopolitical historical approach to orthography realize that language and power are intertwined. Thus, orthographic processes (such as the selection of a script, the codification of a writing system, or the reform of specific spelling norms) are no longer understood as ideologically neutral scientific endeavors but rather as historically situated political activities. Examples offered in the chapter show that orthographies are powerful instruments of inclusion and exclusion, gatekeeping devices that exacerbate and naturalize social inequalities, and ideological mechanisms that reinforce (or challenge) a given political entity. The case study exemplifies the political nature of orthography by examining the spelling system that was made official in Spain in 1844 (and that, with minor changes, remains as today’s standard) as the result of a historical struggle between social actors with different political agendas and different amounts of power to influence the outcomes of the debate. In short, this chapter explains that orthographies are practical and symbolic tools strategically used to impose, maintain or resist particular social identities or politico-economic orders.

This chapter clarifies that the treatment and reliability of orthographic variables as linguistic variables has already been tested with the application of both macroscopic and microscopic approaches to digitalized historical materials. Patterns of variation and change in past periods of a given language have been evidenced through the observation of its users’ sociolinguistic behavior in social interaction. The recent prolific research output in historical sociolinguistics reflects the growth of interest in style and register within the field. The role of new genres and text types (e.g. travel accounts, court records, recipes, diaries, and letters) is thus also being highlighted as materials worth studying for both interspeaker and intraspeaker variation. The chapter explores the indexical potential of orthographic variation in style, register, genre and text types. The extralinguistic factors conditioning the use of different spelling forms in cases of variability are usually based on production, geographical location, sociodemographics (sex, age, rank), social networks, text type (and genre), style, register and medium (handwritten vs. printed). In earlier periods, when correspondence and other ego-documents were probably the most frequent means of written communication and without the existence of a well-established and fixed standard variety, orthographic variation constituted a source of social meaning.

This chapter explains that linguistic uniformity is rarely characteristic of nation-states. In Europe, official national languages brought powerful and ongoing consequences for ‘minority’ languages and their speakers. Nineteenth-century nation- and empire-building affected regional speakers of national languages, such as Flemish or Austrian German, or Afrikaans among other postcolonial varieties of European languages. Imposing European languages in settler nations has irrevocably endangered or eliminated Indigenous languages and cultures. The debates about European orthographic authorities surveyed in this chapter expose conflicting cultural allegiances and pedagogical needs. Vernaculars inherited diverse writing practices from different scholarly discourse communities, whether government chanceries or literary scriptoria or national language academies. Representative conflicts include tensions between scholarly traditions and simplified spellings for mass state education. Existing traditions can be difficult to displace, especially in democracies. Educators’ engagement with the state reminds us that pedagogy is often a matter of politics. Journalists can support or undermine proposed norms, whether using or reporting them. Successful reforms sometimes reflect intersections of low literacy and/or authoritarian states. Many debates that raged in the nineteenth century have continued into modern times. With the rise of social media, individuals can not only internalize but also influence and drive discourses of group identity.

This chapter provides a short introduction to historical orthography, discussing purposes, ambitions and boundaries within the subfield. It also outlines chapter contents.

This chapter introduces readers to the concept of spelling standardization, offering an overview of the ways in which spelling standardization occurred, the agents behind the modern-like developments in historical spelling, and the chronology of the process of development in historical English. The chapter departs from the idea that historical spelling represents one of the most complex facets of linguistic standardization, and one where disagreements exist about its overall process of development. The contribution moves on to discuss the idea that standardization in English spelling was, for some scholars, an intralinguistic, spontaneous process of self-organization, and for others a multiparty affair that involved authors, readers, the printing press and linguistic commentators of the time. The final section summarizes findings from recent work that focuses on large-scale developments over the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, and overviews the role and relevance of theoreticians, schoolmasters, authors and readers in Early Modern English spelling.

This chapter focuses on the terminology and typology relevant to the study of early writing systems from a linguistic perspective. It first introduces writing as a linguistic notation system that arose in the context of numerical and iconographic notation systems, and the study of writing systems as a growing subdiscipline of linguistics. Next, it presents the typology of written signs, including the basic divide between logograms and phonograms. It also describes how writing arose independently in three or four places in the world, resulting in writing systems that were heavily logographic, encoding morphemes, which have both phonological and semantic values. Abstraction along the phonological and semantic dimensions led to phonography and semantic determinatives. The author briefly characterizes each of the pristine systems and considers the typology of phonographic writing more closely, following the traditional division into syllabaries and alphabets. This chapter defends the established definition of syllabary and offers some criticism of the Daniels’ abjad-abugida-alphabet typology of segmental scripts. The chapter presents some early historical examples of phonographic scripts and considers implications of script typology on sign inventory size as well as the evolution of script types, and whether there is directionality in script evolution.

This chapter discusses the ongoing enterprise of developing typologies of writing systems, which strives to propose a coherent framework for classifying the world’s diverse writing systems. Because different theoretical assumptions about the core entities under analysis can yield divergent proposals, it is valuable to continually assess the conceptual and terminology contrasts that both shape and communicate typology proposals. Therefore, this chapter examines the underlying conceptualizations, the diverse, and often inconsistent, terminology, and the main limitations of existing typologies of writing systems, to further elucidate the materialization of written language both diachronically and synchronically. The substantial third section illustrates how the majority of typology proposals classify writing systems primarily in terms of a core set of representational principles, or mapping relationships, assumed to exist between the linguistic units and graphemes of a language. After commenting on the elusive trinity of key terms (writing system, script and orthography), this section outlines some of the most influential, controversial and promising typology proposals and reflects on the various conceptual and terminological distinctions propounded to capture the principles of representational mapping. The last section of the chapter briefly considers the merits of exploring complementary or alternative approaches to writing system typologies.

This chapter gives an overview of different approaches to data collection. Three methods of comparative variable studies are presented in detail and illustrated with examples from the early history of printing: intratextual, intertextual and cross-textual variable analyses. Intratextual variable analysis investigates the frequency and range of spelling variants in a single text copy and is particularly useful for the detection of possible internal factors that trigger the choice of a variant. The intertextual analytical method compares the results of two or more intratextual investigations, for example with respect to different external determinants such as time and place. The third method, cross-textual variable analysis, compares the spelling variants of different versions of the same text, and is concerned with alterations from one version to the other in order to detect a pattern of deliberate changes. The advantages and disadvantages of the three methods are considered in the chapter, and their inherent theoretical premises are discussed. The author shows that data collection and interpretation are closely intertwined, and also that the chosen approach prestructures the data and leads to preferences for specific interpretations.