17.1 Introduction
As a mode of study, philology has a long history, yet the way the term has been used, and the attitude of scholars to both the study of orthography and the meaning of orthographic variation, has changed substantially over time. This chapter outlines the origins and history of philology, from its roots in the Classical period to the present day, and discusses how far philological approaches pertain to the study of historical orthography. Philology’s focus on material, historical and manuscript contexts makes it an especially fruitful way of interrogating historical texts, and philological methods have long been viewed as a particularly apt way of dealing with (among other features) the wide orthographic variation naturally present in medieval works. To illustrate the concerns and approaches of present-day philologists to the study of historical orthography, the chapter presents two case studies. The first focuses on scribal practices in Old English and provides an example of a manuscript-centered analysis of orthography. The second focuses on the scripting of Old English and Old High German and illustrates how historical orthographies can be analyzed by mapping spelling onto an etymological sound reference system.Footnote 1
The term philology ultimately derives from Greek ϕιλολογία ‘love of reasoning, love of learning and literature’, which is a derivative of the compound adjective φιλόλογος ‘fond of words’. It enters the modern European languages via Latin philologia in the later Middle Ages; compare French philologie, Spanish filología, Italian, Portuguese, Polish filologia , Czech filologie, Russian филоло́гия. The English and German words (philology, Philologie) are coined on the basis of the French form.Footnote 2 Philology involves a wide range of practices that are generally linked to the study of texts and languages. Initially tied to the task of editing works from Classical Antiquity (fifth century BC–fifth century AD), philology has split into separate branches, including Classical philology, comparative philology (or historical linguistics), manuscript studies, Altertumskunde, as well as literary criticism.Footnote 3 As a result of the differentiation of philology, the notion as to what philological approaches entail has changed considerably and also differs from discipline to discipline. Nevertheless, all philological practices are characterized by an orientation toward the material sources in which the languages and literatures of the past are attested.
Not only the notion of what philological approaches entail but also their appreciation has changed. Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) placed a very high value on philology when he famously claimed that “none among the sciences is prouder, more noble, more pugnacious than philology and more implacable against mistakes.”Footnote 4 On the other hand, in the first half of the twentieth century, Buchstabenphilologie (i.e. philology of letters) came to be used as a derogatory term assigned to research that was held to rely too strongly on the written word. In the past decades, philology has undergone a rehabilitation, particularly in the context of historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics with a strong focus on the manuscript evidence. The different uses of philology have impacted philological approaches to orthography. Whether orthography was considered worthy of study has waxed and waned with the fortunes of philology itself.
17.2 Philology in Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages
In Classical Antiquity (eighth century BC‒fifth century AD) and the Middle Ages (fifth–fifteenth century), philology included all branches of learning, as illustrated by Martianus Capella’s fifth century allegorical encyclopaedia De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (ed. Reference WillisWillis 1983). This work gives an account of the seven maidens which Philology, a personification of learning, receives as a wedding gift from her husband Mercury. The maidens embody the seven liberal arts: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric (the trivium of medieval education); geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music (the quadrivium).Footnote 5 The study of orthography lies at the very foundation of this curriculum as it represents the initial step of the Ars grammatica, the first discipline of the trivium. Classical and medieval discussions of orthography center on the concept of the littera, which combines nomen ‘name’, figura ‘shape’ and vox ‘voice’ (or potestas ‘might’, i.e. the sound value of a letter).Footnote 6 Thus, littera refers not only to the character as a visual unit of a writing system, but also to the sound a character represents, as well as to the name by which it is identified. Consequently, medieval discussions of orthography focus not only on the correct spelling of Latin words but also on their pronunciation. Regional differences of Latin are addressed by Abbo of Fleury in the tenth century: in his Quaestiones grammaticales (ed. Reference Guerreau-JalabertGuerreau-Jalabert 1982), he criticizes the way his students at Ramsay Abbey apparently pronounced words like civis, using the spelling <qui> to represent what must have been the sound /k/.Footnote 7
Medieval accounts of orthography do not normally focus on the vernacular languages. One notable exception is the twelfth-century First Grammatical Treatise (ed. and trans. Reference BenediktssonBenediktsson 1972), which devises an orthographic system for Old Icelandic in which each speech sound is represented by a single character (Reference Huth, Goyens and VerbekeHuth 2003: 444–57). While the First Grammarian’s use of minimal pairs to establish differences between sounds is highly innovative and reminiscent of twentieth-century linguistic methodology, his terminology is firmly grounded in medieval grammatical theory; a stafr , for example, like its Latin counterpart littera, combines shape, sound and name (Reference BenediktssonBenediktsson 1972: 44–45). Sharing the fate of many orthographic reforms, few of the First Grammarian’s suggestions were incorporated into Old Icelandic spelling practice.
17.3 Orthography, Renaissance Philology and Beyond
In the Renaissance (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), philology evolved as the set of methods necessary to edit Classical Greek and Latin texts.Footnote 8 The antiquarian interest of scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth century also extended to the vernacular languages, which resulted in the establishment of ‘modern’ philology. Textual criticism necessitated the collation of different manuscripts and, thus, resulted in fine-grained analyses of orthographic differences and their implications (see Reference Zanobini and SgarbiZanobini 2016: 5). The method culminated in the nineteenth century in Lachmann’s scientific approach to the reconstruction of the archetype of a text – still one of the tenets of Classical and medieval philology.Footnote 9
On a theoretical level, Renaissance scholars started to rethink the Classical concept of littera. Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558), was among the first to criticize the Ars grammatica and to argue that littera referred only to the written letter (Reference Vogt-SpiraVogt-Spira 1991: 311–13). Scaliger adduced spurious etymological ‘evidence’ to support his view: he explained that litera – to be spelled with a single <t> – derives from lineaturae, that is, the lines drawn on the page. Vogt-Spira suggests a connection between this new conceptualization of writing and the practice of silent reading, which certainly became the norm with the spread of printed books, though it must have started some centuries earlier (Reference Vogt-SpiraVogt-Spira 1991: 313–14).Footnote 10 Printing, in any case, did engender a wider debate on orthography, which manifested itself in suggestions for orthographic reforms for the modern languages across sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western Europe (Reference Neis and HasslerNeis 2011: 174). The aim of such propositions was to bring the spelling in line with contemporary pronunciation, as for example, by Louis Meigret (1500–58) for French, John Hart (d. 1574) for English and Gonzalo de Correas (1571–1631) for Spanish (Reference Neis and HasslerNeis 2011, Reference Salmon and LassSalmon 1999: 15–21, Reference LucasLucas 2000). Reform attempts were often informed by philological work on medieval texts. Some of the characters proposed by Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77) for English, for instance, were adopted from Anglo-Saxon scripts, for example <ð> and <þ> for the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives, respectively, or <ꝼ> for /v/ and <ȝ> for /ʤ/ (Reference LucasLucas 2000: 6).
The use of these characters was closely linked to type design.Footnote 11 Such spelling reforms were generally unsuccessful (Reference LiuzzaLiuzza 1996: 25); however, their influence is still visible in the International Phonetic Alphabet.Footnote 12 During the eighteenth-century boom in the publication of pronouncing dictionaries, elocutionists employed a variety of methods for conveying their preferred pronunciation, such as italic and Gothic fonts (Reference JohnstonJohnston 1764), accents and macrons (Reference JonesJones 1798), numeric (Reference KenrickKenrick 1773) and alphanumeric notation (Reference WalkerWalker 1791, Reference SheridanSheridan 1780), or devising their own systems (Reference SpenceSpence 1775) to reconcile spelling and pronunciation.Footnote 13 However, spelling reform itself was not a concern of the eighteenth-century orthoepists.
17.4 Orthography and Comparative Philology
Philology took a new turn in the late eighteenth century with the identification of Sanskrit as an Indo-European language by Sir William Jones in 1786. This discovery resulted in a focus on the relationship and history of the Indo-European languages (Reference Sonderegger, Besch, Betten, Reichmann and SondereggerSonderegger 2000a: 417, Reference Sonderegger, Besch, Betten, Reichmann and Sonderegger2000b: 443), as in the work undertaken by the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask (1787–1832) and the Germans Franz Bopp (1791–1867), and Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859). Jacob Grimm discussed orthography in a lecture addressed to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1847. His starting point was contemporary German orthography, which he considered to be ‘barbaric’ in contrast with earlier spelling:
More than 800 years ago, in St. Gall during the time of Notker, German orthography was in a better state, and great care was applied to the exact designation of our sounds; good things can still be said about the writings of the twelfth and thirteenth century; only since the fourteenth century has it started to deteriorate.
Grimm specifically criticized words in which the spelling deviates from the spoken language, for example, ‘superfluous’ letters in compounds like Schifffahrt,Footnote 14 etymological or hypercorrect spellings, as well as the different ways of representing vowel length (Reference GrimmGrimm 1864: I, 330, 349–50). Interestingly, Grimm also took issue with features of written language that have no counterpart in the spoken language, such as hyphens or apostrophes, as well as word-initial capitals. His remarks illustrate that, in his view, an ideal writing system is closely aligned with the spoken language and has a one-to-one relationship between letters/graphs and sounds. This attitude is coupled with the belief that earlier orthographies represented this ideal state.Footnote 15 Grimm has been accused by later scholars of not being able to distinguish between letters and sounds (see Reference HaasHaas 1990: 10–13). While he may not have been an astute phonetician, part of this criticism arises from Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (1822), whose Book 1 is entitled Von den buchstaben. Yet, Grimm’s use of buchstabe stands in the Classical littera tradition: he clearly separated zeichen (‘sign’) and laut (‘sound’), and he was very aware of the fact that the sounds of historical stages of languages can only partially be recovered from writing. Fowkes goes one step further in his defense of Grimm and argues “that his use of the term Buchstabe was tantamount to ‘phoneme’” (Reference FowkesFowkes 1964: 60).Footnote 16 On the other hand, as Reference HaasHaas (1990: 13) reminds us, as a philologist Grimm primarily dealt with letters and not with sounds.
The neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker ) in the second half of the nineteenth century took the natural sciences, primarily anatomy and biology, as a model for their linguistic work.Footnote 17 On the one hand, this resulted in the application of empirical methods to the study of articulatory phonetics, or ‘sound physiology’. On the other hand, based on the wide-reaching impact of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), it led to the adoption of the tree model for historical linguistics and resulted in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. Orthography is largely ignored in comparative philology, even though an understanding of the letter–sound correlations of the earliest attested stages of languages is a prerequisite for any reconstruction. The attitude of historical linguistics toward writing is reflected in the handbooks on the earlier stages of languages; they traditionally start with a section on spelling and pronunciation before they move on to a more detailed discussion of the phonology and morphology (and rarely the syntax). However, in-depth discussions of the writing system itself are usually absent.Footnote 18 Only a few nineteenth-century studies focus specifically on orthography: there are, for example, Friedrich Wilkens’s Zum hochalemannischen Konsonantismus der althochdeutschen Zeit (1891) and Friedrich Kauffmann’s ‘Über althochdeutsche Orthographie’ (1892), both on Old High German spelling, or Karl D. Bülbring’s ‘Was lässt sich aus dem gebrauch der buchstaben k und c im Matthäus-Evangelium des Rushworth-Manuscripts folgern?’ (1899) on Old English orthography.
A theoretical discussion of writing is provided by Hermann Paul (1846–1921) in Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (Reference PaulPaul 2009 [1880]). In his chapter 13, ‘Language and writing’ (Sprache und schrift ), Paul stresses the fact that any linguistic information from the past is only accessible through “the medium of writing” (das medium der schrift, Reference PaulPaul 2009 [1880]: 245). However, he holds that it is impossible to fully reconvert writing into speech – even in the case of writing systems that are close to spoken language. To illustrate the relationship of spoken and written language, Paul uses two similes: first, spoken language and writing are as a line is to a number (Reference PaulPaul 2009 [1880]: 246), since speech sounds blend into each other whereas writing is discontinuous. Second, they are as a painting to a rough sketch, meaning that writing can never express all the nuances of speech, and only someone who is familiar with the language will be able to recover details such as quantity or stress (Reference PaulPaul 2009 [1880]: 249–50).
17.5 Saussure and the Structuralists
Starting with Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857–1913) ground-breaking publications, philology, referring to a diachronic analysis of language, came to be contrasted with synchronic linguistics. Saussure explicitly criticized philology for “attaching itself too slavishly to the written language and forgetting the living language” (Reference SaussureSaussure 1995 [1916]: 14). In his view, the only function of writing was to represent spoken language; for those who study writing rather than language Saussure used a comparison similar to the one presented by Hermann Paul: “It is as if one believed that, in order to know someone, one should look at his photo rather than at his face” (Reference SaussureSaussure 1995 [1916]: 45). Therefore, he argued, the sole object of linguistics is spoken language. The only reason for studying writing is that linguists need to understand its “functionality, defects and perils” (44) in order to recover language from written sources.
This view dominated the structuralists’ approach to language, which culminated in Leonard Bloomfield’s famous statement in his introduction to Language that, “[w]riting is not language, but merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks” (Reference BloomfieldBloomfield 1973 [1933]: 21). While Bloomfield considered writing an impediment, whose study is only needed in order to “get […] information about the speech of past times” (Reference BloomfieldBloomfield 1973: 20–21), he nevertheless devoted one chapter to “Written records” (Reference BloomfieldBloomfield 1973: 297–313), in which he discussed the properties and history of different writing systems. Bloomfield also used a simile to illustrate the relationship of writing to language: “writing is […] merely an external device, like the use of the phonography, which happens to preserve for our observation some features of the speech of past times” (Reference BloomfieldBloomfield 1973: 299). The generally negative attitude toward writing meant that, as Reference VenezkyVenezky (1970: 10) put it, “orthography was relegated to the backporch of the new linguistic science.”
In the Prague linguistic circle, Josef Vachek (1909–96) began to rethink the structuralist stance on writing, identifying written language as a separate norm alongside spoken language. Vachek saw the two norms as independent but co-ordinated representations of a universal linguistic norm, or langue. Yet, he accorded independent status only to established writing systems and considered the earliest attempts at writing by a linguistic community as “a mere transposition of the spoken norm” (Reference VachekVachek 1939: 102) or as “a kind of quasi-transcription” (Reference VachekVachek 1945–49: 91) and, thus, as a secondary system of representation. Vachek’s work heralded the development of grapholinguistics as a separate linguistic discipline. This field has been dominated by a debate on the relationship between writing and spoken language and the consequent methodological question whether to use an autonomistic or a relational approach for graphemic analysis. Proponents of an autonomistic approach call for an analysis of written language without making recourse to the spoken language.Footnote 19
17.6 Philology in the Twentieth Century
Philological approaches to orthography in the twentieth century have largely eschewed autonomistic methods. Instead, they are characterized by a careful assessment of spelling evidence in combination with other philological methods. Particular significance has been attached to the letter–sound correlations of the Latin alphabet in different regions and time periods. An early study urging a reconsideration of the evidence of orthographic variation was Reference DauntDaunt’s (1939) examination of the Old English spellings which were traditionally viewed as representing short diphthongs arising from a number of sound changes.Footnote 20 Under one such change (breaking), monophthongs which were followed by /r/ or /l/ plus another consonant (or by /h/ on its own) became diphthongs, for example weorpan, eald, feohtan. Daunt reinterpreted the digraphs <ea> and <eo>, not as evidence of short diphthongs, but as allophones of the short vowels /æ/ and /e/, the second vowel indicating the velar quality of the following consonant. According to Daunt, this was due to Irish influence on Old English orthography, where vowel graphs are used as diacritics to distinguish velarized and palatalized consonants.Footnote 21
Important work on Old High German orthography and phonology was undertaken by Penzl. His numerous publications provided new impulses, in particular, by making explicit some of the methodological issues at stake (e.g. Reference PenzlPenzl 1950, Reference Penzl1959, Reference Penzl1971, Reference Penzl1982, Reference Penzl and Luelsdorff1987).Footnote 22 For example, Reference PenzlPenzl (1971: 305) proposes a method for establishing the phonological systems of early Germanic languages, which combines an “internal graphemic analysis” with a “diagraphic comparison.” The first takes into consideration the “choice and distribution of graphemes” within a single text, while the latter entails an analysis of the spelling attested in earlier or later periods as well as in different dialects. Penzl illustrates the application of this method with an example from the St. Gall Paternoster & Creed (c. 790). This text uses <o>, <oo> in words like losi, prooth, sonen, erstoont. Comparing this material with the same words in Notker’s works (eleventh century), it becomes clear that for Notker there is a graphic contrast between <ô> (lôse, brôt) and <uô> ([be]suônet, irstuônt ). Early St. Gall charter material (before 762) shows that Notker’s <ô> corresponds to <au> or later <ao> (e.g. Autmarus, Gaozberto); this is not the case for Notker’s <uô>, which corresponds to <o> in the charters. This evidence makes it clear that in the Paternoster & Creed “the two o oo must have been different, even if lack of symbols led to their graphic merger in the writing system of [St.] G[all] Pat[ernoster]’s scribe” (Reference PenzlPenzl 1971: 306). Penzl’s method also takes other types of evidence into consideration, which include comparative data from the wider language family, meter and rhyme, loanwords, typological aspects, as well as metalinguistic comments. On a theoretical level, Reference PenzlPenzl (1971: 307) identified the “phonemic fit of the orthography” as “a major consideration” of any analysis of written texts. He questioned the structuralist assumption of biuniqueness (i.e. a one-to-one relation of graphemes and phonemes), which resulted either in misconceptions of the phonology represented by early orthographies or in a rejection of writing as an object worthy of study. In Penzl’s work, by contrast, a careful consideration of the “complex orthographic solutions” (Reference PenzlPenzl 1971: 307) leads to a deeper understanding of writing systems and their evolution.
In another work arguing for a more nuanced relationship between orthography and sound values, Reference Clark and HicksClark (1992a) worked at the intersection of history and onomastics. She carefully considered the spellings of personal and place names in the Domesday Book, which routinely render /θ/ and /ð/ as <t> or <d>, for example. Clark disputed the traditional view that these unetymological spellings represented the effects of French speakers’ pronunciation on insular names, and concluded that the Domesday scribes were “not consciously representing current pronunciations used either by scribes or by informants” (Reference Clark and HicksClark 1992a: 320); rather, they were deliberately rendering insular names according to Latin (or, when that failed, French) orthographic norms, in the context of what was a Latin-language administrative text. Similar considerations involving detailed discussions of the pronunciation of medieval Latin, letter–sound correlations and vernacular phonology resulted, for example, in Reference Harvey, Glaser, Seiler and WaldispühlHarvey’s (2011) reassessment of the origins of Celtic orthography (and publications cited there), or Reference DietzDietz’s (2006) analysis of digraphs in the transition from Old to Middle English. These studies demonstrate philology’s continuing applicability to a number of related disciplines.
17.7 ‘New Philology’ and Pragmaphilology
In the second half of the twentieth century, a renewed emphasis on the value of the manuscript sources of medieval texts lay at the heart of ‘New Philology’. This approach arose from concerns among literary scholars that medieval studies – long seen as a bastion of the philological method – had become marginalized and widely perceived as irrelevant in the face of newer methodologies and advances, particularly in literary criticism. In a special volume of Speculum, Reference NicholsNichols (1990) describes New Philology in terms of a renewal, with a strong desire among its adherents to return to its origins in manuscript culture. This entailed a concentration on the materiality of the text (see Chapter 15, this volume), in contrast with earlier focuses on text stemmata and the reconstruction of an idealized, ‘original’ text as envisaged by its author. The new approach presented itself as a fundamental shift; whereas earlier efforts had had the effect of narrowing the variation (orthographic, morphological or lexical) naturally present in multiple-witness texts in an attempt to retrieve the author’s ‘original’ text, New Philologists emphasized the importance of variety inherent in the different manuscripts.Footnote 23 Variety in the manuscript and linguistic variation were seen as fundamental aspects of the condition of medieval texts:
If we accept the multiple forms in which our artifacts have been transmitted, we may recognize that medieval culture did not simply live with diversity, it cultivated it. The ‘new’ philology of the last decade or more reminds us that, as medievalists, we need to embrace the consequences of that diversity, not simply live with it, but to situate it squarely within our methodology.
New Philology’s emphasis on the original manuscript text aligned literary studies more closely with some of the more language-oriented approaches to studying manuscript texts, although some questioned whether New Philology offered anything that was not already being done.Footnote 24
More recent work has again returned to the question of manuscript transmission and how this can be elucidated by the evidence offered by orthographic variation.Footnote 25 Scholars in historical linguistics have also sought a return to the manuscript text; such a plea was at the heart of Reference Lass, Dossena and LassLass’s (2004) essay which, in focusing on the processes of textual selection in corpus-building, makes a strong case for the inclusion only of texts as they occur in their manuscript form. He advocates the faithful recording of features such as spelling, capitalization and punctuation, and rejects edited texts which normalize or modernize; building a corpus from edited texts runs the risk of incorporating the distortions of editorial choices into the evidence we are able to gain from corpus inquiry. Reference 762SmithSmith (1996: 14) also emphasizes the necessity of bringing together philological and linguistic approaches when studying Old or Middle English, as advocated in historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics. He points out that as our earliest records of the language are mediated to us through writing, an understanding of writing systems is essential if we are to undertake effective historical language research (Reference 762SmithSmith 1996: 56).Footnote 26
The emergence of pragmaphilology as a discipline also reflects the increasing preoccupation of scholars with the written text in its context. In a seminal publication heralding the arrival of the new discipline, Reference Jacobs, Jucker and JuckerJacobs and Jucker (1995: 11–12) state that “adequate (i.e. pragmatic) analysis of historical texts must study these texts in their entirety including sociohistorical context, their production process and – crucially – a faithful account not only of the syntactic/lexical level but also the physical and orthographic level.” Among the more recent studies in the field are those which combine small details (e.g. punctuation or paleography) with morphosyntactic features and wider concerns such as the social contexts of a text’s production, in order to produce a more nuanced and rounded picture of the text and its communicative function.Footnote 27 At heart, pragmaphilology, in common with New Philology and other recent fields in linguistics such as historical sociolinguistics, maintains a focus on original texts. As Reference Taavitsainen, Fitzmaurice, Fitzmaurice and TaavitsainenTaavitsainen and Fitzmaurice (2007: 18) note, “a prerequisite for the conduct of historical pragmatics is the acceptance of written texts as legitimate data.” The increasing availability of high-quality facsimiles and online scans of manuscripts has been fundamental in enabling a more manuscript-centered approach which is able to account for factors such as paleographical data alongside areas which fall more traditionally under the domain of linguistics. Reference BaischBaisch (2018: 183) notes that the increasing availability of digital editions “has begun to open up new possibilities which reflect central preoccupations of the New Philology.”
17.8 A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English
While not always a mainstream approach, the philological focus on manuscript text and context repeatedly surfaces as a primary concern among scholars working on medieval language and literature. This holistic approach is exemplified by the substantial body of work undertaken in compiling A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME, Reference 725McIntosh, Samuels, Benskin, Laing and WilliamsonMcIntosh et al. 1986a) and its subsequent counterpart, A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME, Reference LaingLaing 2013–). The seeds of LALME were sown by McIntosh in an article in which he advocated the study of Middle English orthography in its own right, and not just as a way to devise or understand the correspondence between written and spoken Middle English (Reference McIntoshMcIntosh 1956). His confidence in the value of the evidence of written language in its own right was not widely shared at the time, and put him at odds with the structuralist stance: “there is beyond doubt at present a fairly prevalent feeling that the approach to spoken manifestations of language is in some fundamental sense a more rewarding – not to say reputable – pursuit than that to written texts” (Reference McIntoshMcIntosh 1956: 37). This approach was informed by McIntosh’s earlier work as a dialectologist in present-day Scots, and his observations that orthographic patterns were apparent in surviving Middle English manuscripts which enabled him to make geographical or dialectal correspondences.
McIntosh’s methodology was novel in that it treated each manuscript witness as a linguistic informant, the equivalent of a living speaker in a dialect survey. From each witness he collected counts of a wide range of variants akin to a dialect questionnaire to construct profiles for each scribe (Reference McIntoshMcIntosh 1974: 602–3). These included ‘S-features’ (reflective of spoken language differences, such as hem/þem), ‘W-features’ (orthographic features, reflective of written language and which have no bearing on the pronunciation of a word, such as sche/she) and ‘G-features’ (paleographical features such as the shape of a particular graph). Throughout, McIntosh emphasizes the value of working across disciplines to view the problem in the round, because “it is sometimes the case that that a scribe fails to impose his own S-features on texts but does impose upon them various scribal characteristics of his own” (Reference McIntoshMcIntosh 1974: 603). That is to say, paleographical variants are used alongside evidence from spellings which encode spoken variation, as well as those spellings which do not. This complementary evidence is used as part of the ‘fit technique’ to place writers geographically.Footnote 28
This build-up of small details culled directly from the manuscripts themselves enabled LALME researchers to categorize scribal behavior into different types; for example, a scribe may choose to copy his exemplar text literatim, reproducing a near-identical text, or he may ‘translate’ the exemplar into his own linguistic norms, substituting his favored spellings for those he finds in his exemplar. Or he may choose to do something in between, perhaps beginning as a more literatim scribe before moving to translating behavior as he becomes more familiar with the exemplar’s forms. Reference Benskin, Laing, Benskin and SamuelsBenskin and Laing (1981) also described the behavior of a Mischsprache scribe: one who produces both forms from the exemplar and those from his own preferred usage, but who, importantly, maintains this behavior throughout his copy. Altogether, this methodology not only tells us about the way the scribe of the surviving manuscript went about his task, but it can also allow us to build, through the collection of relict forms, an idea of the nature of the underlying exemplar. As Reference LaingLaing (1988: 83) notes, “dialectal analysis often provides the means to do far more than place a scribe on the map.” More recent research has focused on what can be discovered about the writing systems employed by different scribes; careful and painstaking analysis has revealed the use by some writers of “litteral substitution sets” (where one sound is represented by several litterae), and by others of “potestatic substitution sets” (where one symbol represents several sounds; see Reference Laing and LassLaing and Lass 2009: 1).Footnote 29 Reference LaingLaing (1999) details, for example, how changes in the written forms of <þ>, <ƿ> and <y> during the Middle English period led to the interchangeable use of these graphs by some scribes to map a range of pronunciations including /ð/, /θ/, /w/ and /j/. Reference Laing and LassLaing and Lass (2009) see scribal variation as overlapping function and formal equivalence, as systematic, and not a result of ‘mental failure’ or ‘scribal error’.Footnote 30 This emphasis on the value of the input of the scribe (as a ‘native speaker’), rather than trying to correct something that is perceived as an inferior version of the author’s original, links the LALME/LAEME project’s attitude to historical texts with that of new philologists, historical sociolinguists and pragmaphilologists: “[i]t is recognised that a ‘corrupt’ text may reflect the activity of a contemporary editor, critic, or adaptor rather than that of a merely careless copyist” (Reference LaingLaing 1988: 83).
17.9 Case Study: Two Scribes of the Tanner Bede
The methods outlined by the compilers of LALME/LAEME are not only of use for the study of Middle English but can also be applied to Old English material, although the language situation is rather different; in general later writers of Old English appear to have used a focused variety (i.e. late West Saxon), whereas Middle English was “par excellence, the dialectal phase of English” (Reference StrangStrang 1970: 224), when writing routinely reflected local usage.Footnote 31 The important thing to bear in mind is that many surviving Old English texts are copies, rather than autograph writings, meaning that what we see on the page is not the result (as in our second case study below) of a considered scripting choice, but the outcome of the copying behavior of the latest scribe. Thus, in line with McIntosh’s observations, we may detect orthographic features as well as morphosyntactic ones, which may have been transmitted from the exemplar text, or else translated into the scribe’s own preferred usage. The difference between looking at late Old English and Middle English is that Old English literacy was probably far less widespread socially, being more or less restricted to the ecclesiastical elite. In addition, the destruction of Northumbrian and Mercian monasteries and their libraries during the Viking attacks of the ninth and tenth centuries means that a substantial part of our data for Old English comes from eleventh-century Wessex and the dialect written there (Reference Fulk and CainFulk and Cain 2013: 21–22).
This case study examines the performance of two scribes from Oxford, Bodleian Library Tanner 10 (T), a late tenth-century copy of the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, and is based on the methodology developed in Reference WallisWallis (2013) and adapted from that of the LALME project. An examination of T alongside the other Bede manuscripts reveals that the original translation, which no longer exists, was written in a Mercian dialect, and the text was progressively West-Saxonized as a succession of scribes recopied it during the late tenth and eleventh centuries (Reference MillerMiller 1890, Reference WallisWallis 2013). In total five scribes contributed to T, and the two under examination are referred to as T2 and T4.Footnote 32 A questionnaire was used to collect the variant spellings, from which five features are examined.Footnote 33 These are all conservative features indicative of Bede ’s original Mercian dialect: ah is a form of ac (‘but’) commonly found in Anglian dialects, rather than West Saxon (Reference HoggHogg 1992a: 275), while ec is a spelling of eac (‘also’) which shows Anglian smoothing (Reference CampbellCampbell 1959: 95). Spellings retaining <oe> represent the rounding of ē, found in non–West-Saxon dialects (Reference CampbellCampbell 1959: 76–78, 133), while double vowel combinations, for example tiid for tid (‘time’), are found in older texts representing long vowels (Reference CampbellCampbell 1959: 13). Cuom- and cwom- represent early spellings of com- the past tense of cuman (‘to come’), before the loss of -w- (Reference Ringe and TaylorRinge and Taylor 2014: 339). These features are summarized in Table 17.1.
Table 17.1 Spelling variation in T2 and T4
| Relict feature | Newer variant |
|---|---|
| ah | ac |
| ec | eac |
| oe | e |
| double vowels: aa, ee, ii, oo, uu | a, e, i, o, u |
| cuom-, cwom- | com- |
These features appear sporadically as relicts in other Bede manuscripts, as well as in T. It is important not only to ascertain the form(s) of each feature present, but also where each instance occurs, by folio. In that way we can detect whether a scribe’s behavior is consistent throughout his stint, or whether it changes as he writes. Two main trends are noticeable about T2’s performance. Firstly, he has a strong tendency to use the more conservative spellings; for example, he only ever uses ah, and never ac, while he transmits six <oe> spellings, including roeðnis ‘storminess’, woedelnisse ‘poverty’ and woen ‘hope’. Another relict feature transmitted throughout his stint is the use of double vowels, rendering both proper and common nouns; his 23 examples include tiidum ‘time’, cwoom ‘came’ and the personal name eedgils. Finally, T2 only uses older spellings of the past tense of the verb cuman ; while he vacillates between the older <u> for w and the newer wynn, it is notable that he never writes com (see our second case study on variation between <u> and wynn in Old English).Footnote 34 One place where T2 may introduce a form of his own is on a single occasion right at the beginning of his stint, where he writes eac (f. 103r). However, following this he always writes ec (three times), apparently following his exemplar. It would appear then that T2’s copying behavior falls toward the literatim end of the spectrum; there is little evidence on the basis of the features discussed here to suggest that he brings many of his own preferred spellings to his copy, and he maintains conservative spellings throughout.
When T2 reached the end of his stint, the copying task was taken up by T4, whose approach over the next 18 folios is rather different. T4 begins by reproducing a number of forms from his exemplar, and on the first two folios (f. 117v–118r) we find ah, ec, cuom, cwom, and forðfoered ‘to depart, die’ with an <oe> spelling. It is quite clear that as he continues, T4 gradually abandons these inherited spellings for ones which reflect his own training and preferences. What is notable, however, is that he does not change all these spellings at the same point in his copy; while ec is soon changed to eac on f. 118r, com makes its appearance a little later, on f. 119r. Rather later still is the change from ah to ac (f. 121v), suggesting that these changes happen perhaps at a lexical level, rather than at a systematic, orthographic level; previous exposure to a spelling does not seem to be a factor, as ec is written only once before the spelling is changed, while ah appears four times before it is replaced. It is rather more difficult to say whether the lack of <oe> forms in the later folios represents a conscious change by T4, or whether it was simply the case that no such forms existed in this part of the exemplar.
A different pattern is shown, however, by the four double vowel spellings, which appear, rather sporadically, throughout T4’s stint in words such as aa ‘always’ and riim ‘reckoning’. Although the contributions of both scribes are short, it appears that T2 is rather more likely to transmit a double vowel spelling than T4 (23 times in 1,540 graphic units, against T4’s four times in 3,651 graphic units). It is possible that fewer double vowel spellings occurred in T4’s section of the text than in T2’s, although the fact that such spellings are also transmitted by scribes T1 and T5 suggests that this is unlikely. That double vowels occur in each scribe’s stint, though to differing degrees, might suggest that they were not felt by the scribes to be too incongruous a spelling, or that they were part of the T scribes’ passive repertoire (Reference Benskin, Laing, Benskin and SamuelsBenskin and Laing 1981: 58–59). T4, then, acts as a translator scribe, albeit one who starts out more literatim, before ‘writing in’ to his own preferred norms and style. Of course, without the original exemplar, we cannot be entirely sure to what extent either scribe made alterations in their text, and it should be stressed that this is not an exhaustive survey. Nevertheless, comparison of T2 and T4 with each other, and with other scribes of the Bede manuscripts, allows us to build a picture of the sorts of features we would expect to have been in the archetype, and which therefore may well have occurred in T’s exemplar. Building up a scribal profile, which aims to analyze both the features used as well as their distribution, enables us to map the internal consistency of each scribe, in addition to their differences from one another.
17.10 Quantification in Philological Approaches to Orthography
Beyond the research on early English encouraged by the LALME/LAEME project, a number of philological approaches to orthography from the early decades of the twenty-first century have addressed written language by mapping spelling onto a linguistic reference system. This method was initially developed by Mihm and Elmentaler in the context of a project entitled Niederrheinische Sprachgeschichte at the University of Duisburg, which focused on administrative writing in Duisburg from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century (as described in Reference ElmentalerElmentaler 2003: 49–51). While rejecting an autonomistic analysis of written language as impractical, Elmentaler takes great pains to avoid circular reasoning. This is achieved by analyzing graphs (Graphien) according to their correspondence to Lautpositionen (‘sound positions’), which are units defined by sound etymology and context. Elmentaler’s research also relies on the strict separation of scribes and exact quantification (Reference ElmentalerElmentaler 2003: 60–63). Graphs and sound positions are correlated, which makes it possible to establish the grapheme systems of individual scribes and to assess the overlap in the representation of different sound positions. On a wider level, Elmentaler’s research confirms that early written languages are fully functional, that the letter–sound correlations of Latin are persistent, and that change in written language is often discontinuous (Reference ElmentalerElmentaler 2003: 51–53).
Subsequent studies have applied Mihm and Elmentaler’s approach to other types of material: Reference LarsenLarsen (2001, Reference Larsen2004) has adopted it for a study on Middle Dutch statutes of the Flemish town of Ghent, Reference KawasakiKawasaki (2004) for a graphemic analysis of the Old Saxon Heliand, and Reference SeilerSeiler (2014) in the context of research on the earliest Old English, Old High German and Old Saxon sources. These studies address different research questions and, consequently, adapt the relational method to suit their own purpose: Larsen aims at establishing the entire grapheme systems represented in the material from Ghent; Kawasaki systematically compares the spellings for the dental letters þ, d, đ and t across the five extant manuscripts of Heliand ; and Seiler investigates, on the one hand, how a number of consonant phonemes are represented and, on the other hand, how ‘superfluous’ graphemes like <k>, <q>, <x> and <z> are employed. These differences aside, the studies share a cautious stance when it comes to attributing exact sound values to the orthographic features under investigation and they all aim to elucidate the workings of nonstandardized writing systems.
17.11 Case Study: The Scripting of /w/ in Old English and Old High German
This second case study focuses on the spellings for one sound, the continuant of Proto-Germanic */w/ in Old English and Old High German. This sound was phonologically stable, yet it is represented in various ways since Latin had no corresponding sound and, therefore, the alphabet provided no suitable character.Footnote 35 The case study provides insights into the scripting of Old English and Old High German; the details presented here are based on a comparative analysis of early orthography (Reference SeilerSeiler 2014), which relies on quantitative data to identify the factors determining graphemic choices. The methodology is adapted from Reference ElmentalerElmentaler (2003; see above), mapping spellings onto an etymological reference system. The results show that while, overall, the spellings for Old English and Old High German /w/ are variable, there are clear-cut diatopic and diachronic patterns. Furthermore, different orthographic solutions tend to be used for specific sound positions. Once these factors are taken into consideration, Old English and Old High German orthographies turn out to be surprisingly consistent.
When scribes in England and in Frankia started to write their vernacular languages with the Latin alphabet, three typologically distinct spellings for the representation of /w/ were available to them. The first option was to use single <u>, though this graph stood for labiodental /v/ in Latin; the second spelling consisted of the digraph <uu>, and a third option was to adopt the character <ƿ>, named wynn ‘joy’, from the runic script (ᚹ). All three spellings (as well as some others) are attested in Old English and Old High German sources, yet their patterns of distribution are very different. Wynn is the standard spelling in Old English from the ninth century onward and remained in use well beyond the end of the Anglo-Saxon period.Footnote 36 Early Old English sources, going back to the late seventh and eighth century, generally use <u> or <uu> instead, though rare instances of wynn occur. Single <u> dominates in the eighth-century versions of Cædmon’s Hymn transmitted as part of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (see the extract from the Moore manuscript under (1) below) and is found in names attested in the earliest Anglo-Saxon charters. Even in texts that use <ƿ> or <uu> elsewhere, <u> is often retained as a spelling for /w/ in the consonant clusters /kw/, /hw/, /sw/ and so on, as for example in the Alfredian translation of the Pastoral Care, which normally employs <ƿ> but uses <cu>, <su> and so on for these clusters (2).Footnote 37 These spellings are clearly modeled on Latin words, like suavis ‘sweet’, which contain a bilabial semivowel (Reference StotzStotz 1996: 142). Double <uu> occurs only occasionally, mostly in early Mercian sources as exemplified by examples from the Épinal Glossary (3). However, the digraph spelling continues to be used in Old English names in Anglo-Latin texts as in the Vita St. Æthelwoldi (4) (Reference Lapidge and WinterbottomLapidge and Winterbottom 1991: clxxxviii). Again, there is a restriction: <uu> is rarely used before the vowel /u/ (e.g. uulfgar and not **uuulfgar). The following text samples illustrate the range of spellings found in different Anglo-Saxon sources:
(1) Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard, metudæs maecti end his modgidanc, uerc uuldurfadur, sue he uundra gihuaes, eci dryctin, or astelidæ (Cædmon’s Hymn from the Moore manuscript, Cambridge University Library, MS Kk. 5.16, c. 737, ed. Reference DobbieDobbie 1942: 105; emphasis added here and throughout);
(2) Ne cuæð he ðæt forðyðe he ænegum men ðæs ƿyscte oððe ƿilnode, ac he ƿitgode sua sua hit geƿeorðan sceolde (Old English Pastoral Care, Bodleian Library, Hatton MS 20, late ninth century, ed. Reference 768SweetSweet 1871: I, 29.10);
(3) [232] ca[ta]ractis: uuaeterthruch ‘water-pipe’, [1026] telum: uueb ‘web’, [1040] taberna: uuinaern ‘tavern’, [1045] talpa: uuandaeuuiorpae ‘mole’, [1062] uitelli: suehoras ‘fathers-in-law’, [1088] uirecta: quicae ‘green place’ (Épinal Glossary, c. 700, ed. Reference PheiferPheifer 1974);
(4) Est enim ciuitas quaedam modica, commerciis abunde referta, quae solito uuealinga ford appellatur, in qua uir strenuus quidam morabatur, cui nomen erat Ælfhelmus, qui casu lumen amittens oculorum cecitatem multis perpessus est annis. Huic in somnis tempore gallicinii sanctus AĐELVVOLDUS antistes adstitit eumque ut maturius uuintoniam pergeret et ad eius tumbam gratia recipiendi uisus accederet ammonuit […] (Vita St. Æthelwoldi, ed. Reference LockhartLapidge and Winterbottom 1991: 42).Footnote 38
In Old High German, the digraph <uu> is already the regular spelling for w in the earliest sources in the eighth century. Its use is doubtless modeled on West Frankish spelling practice, where <uu> is attested in personal names on coins and charters from the late sixth century onward (e.g. UUaldemarus, UUandeberctus, see Reference WellsWells 1972: 118–19, 144, 157, Reference FelderFelder 2003: 700). From Merovingian Frankia the digraph presumably also spread to Anglo-Saxon England (Reference Seiler, Conti, Rold and ShawSeiler 2015: 119–20). Eventually, <uu> or <vv> were combined into a single character with touching or overlapping strokes, resulting in the establishment of a new letter <w>.Footnote 39 The runic character wynn, on the other hand, is restricted to a small number of texts and is rarely used consistently (Reference 659Braune and HeidermannsBraune and Heidermanns 2018: 24). The presence of wynn in Old High German is generally attributed to Anglo-Saxon influence. One text in which it is found is in the Hildebrandslied, an alliterative heroic poem (5). The mixture of <uu> and <ƿ> spellings suggests that wynn occurred in the exemplar from which the extant version was copied but was not normally used by the two scribes (see Reference LührLühr 1982: 32–34). The Hildebrandslied was copied in Fulda, one of the centers of the Anglo-Saxon mission on the Continent, which explains the presence of insular influence in the scriptorium.
The restrictions on <uu> found in Old English also apply to Old High German orthography: in consonant clusters and before the vowel /u/ many scribes prefer single <u> as a spelling for /w/ (5, 6, 7). One exception to this rule is Otfrid of Weissenburg, who explicitly speaks out in favor of ‘triple-u’ for the sequence /wu-/ in one of the prefaces to his Evangelienbuch : “Sometimes, as I believe, three u are necessary for the sound; the first two as consonants, as it seems to me, but the third keeping its vocalic sound” (ed. Reference MagounMagoun 1943: 880). Otfrid also insisted on this spelling being used in the Evangelienbuch (see Reference Seiler and RobinsonSeiler 2010: 92–95, 99). For the representation of the cluster /kw/, many Old High German sources resort to <qu> or similar spellings, as in the Old High German translation of Tatian’s Diatessaron (6). This spelling is clearly modeled on the large number of Latin words containing a labiovelar (quia, quod and so on). Incidentally, the same spelling occurs in some Old English sources (e.g. quicae in (3) above).
Overall, Old High German orthography is highly idiosyncratic and more prone to intricate digraph and trigraph spellings than Old English. The scribe of part Ka of the Abrogans glossary, for example, uses <ouu> to represent Proto-Germanic */w/ in clusters with /s/ or /z/, single <u> in other clusters and double <uu> elsewhere (7). It is possible that the trigraph owes its composition to the insertion of a parasitic vowel after the sibilant (Reference 659Braune and HeidermannsBraune and Heidermanns 2018: 103); however, many intricate spelling rules are graphic in nature and unconnected to the sound level. The following examples illustrate the range of Old High German spellings for /w/:
(5) […] gurtun sih iro suert ana, helidos, ubar [h]ringa. do sie to dero hiltiu ritun. hiltibraht gimahalta, heribrantes sunu – her uuas heroro man, ferahes frotoro –; her fragen gistuont fohem uuortum, [h]ƿ́er sin fater ƿ́ari […] (Hildebrandslied 5b–9, c. 830, ed. Reference LührLühr 1982, I, 2);Footnote 40
(6) Inti quad Zacharias zi themo engile: uuanan uueiz ih thaz? ih bim alt, inti mīn quena fram ist gigangan in ira tagun (Old High German Tatian, c. 830; ed. by Reference Braune and EbbinghausBraune and Ebbinghaus 1994: 47);
(7) [12.19] ambiguus : undar zouuaim ‘going two ways’, [12.20] dubius : zouuiual ‘doubt’, [28.20] natare : souuimman ‘to swim’, [29.02] natabat : souuam ‘swam’; [13.11] ambitus : cadhuing ‘region’, [23.06] ego inquid : ih qhuad ‘I said’, [30.16] adfligit : thuingit ‘he throws down’; [10.21] almum : uuih ‘holy’, [25.16] crescit : uuahsit ‘it grows’ (Abrogans, Cod. Sang. 911, c. 790, ed. Reference Bischoff, Duft and SondereggerBischoff et al. 1977).
A comparison of the spellings for /w/ in Old English and Old High German suggests that similar factors were at work. Orthographic solutions are influenced by two opposing principles: firstly, a desire for an unambiguous representation of vernacular sounds and, secondly, the rules of Latin grammar. This leads to compromises such as single <u> in clusters and before the vowel /u/, while <uu> is used elsewhere. The dominance of Latin spelling practice and orthographic rules results in similarities between individual writing systems but also across the traditions of the West Germanic languages. Such similarities are owing to a shared background rather than to direct influence from one spelling system to another. Individual scribes define their own, sometimes intricate spelling rules, though Old English spelling coalesces toward a relatively uniform representation of the vernacular in the course of the Anglo-Saxon period. Old High German orthography, on the other hand, remains more fragmented. Finally, scribal choices are also affected by the text genre. In nonstandardized writing systems, spellings often carry associations beyond the sounds that they represent. The runic character ƿ, for example, is clearly a ‘vernacular’ graph. Single <u> but also the digraph <uu>, on the other hand, stand for (Merovingian) Latinity and are thus more suitable for the representation of vernacular elements in Latin texts.Footnote 41 On a more general level, this case study shows how core philological methods can be updated to reach a more sophisticated understanding of the writing systems of the past. This entails, on the one hand, a more nuanced assessment of the correlations of spellings and sounds and, on the other, investigating writing systems as culturally transmitted phenomena that contain features going beyond sound representation. By shifting attention squarely onto written language, the term Buchstabenphilologie may thus be reclaimed as the study of writing in its own right.
17.12 Conclusion
The popularity of philology has waxed and waned among scholars of historical texts. However, it has never been entirely eclipsed by other methods. It has frequently been noted that ‘philology’ is difficult to define (e.g. Reference NicholsNichols 1990: 2, Reference Fulk, Kytö and PahtaFulk 2016: 95), encompassing a wide range of methods and involving competence in a number of disciplines.Footnote 42 Nevertheless, it is because it is a fundamental part of textual scholarship that philology remains a relevant and valid approach to the study of historical texts on a variety of levels. While the concerns of philologists may have moved away from the tasks of textual editing and the recovery of the original authorial text, the methodology and expertise developed by philologists now find their use in “mediating between the demands of linguistic methodology and the limitations that beset the records of prior states of the language available for linguistic analysis” (Reference Fulk, Kytö and PahtaFulk 2016: 96). It is precisely this mediating role which is most valuable; philology is easily absorbed by and combined with newer theoretical linguistic approaches, providing scholars with a deeper understanding of the “extralinguistic contexts of linguistic data” (Reference Fulk, Kytö and PahtaFulk 2016: 95). Thus, a range of scholarship has developed that combines philological sensitivities with the theoretical underpinning of, for example, variationist linguistics in historical sociolinguistics, or politeness theory in historical pragmatics. It is arguably in these fields, where philological methods are able to take advantage of advances in digital humanities such as corpus linguistics or digital editing, that we see the most fruitful combinations of many of the strands laid down by twentieth-century work (e.g. New Philology, pragmaphilology, LALME), much of which involves the study of historical orthographies, alongside several other features. Finally, there is an emphasis in these newer fields on finding new texts to study, often from the kinds of writers who have been overlooked by traditional scholarship, such as documents from lower-class writers in ‘language history from below’ (Reference Elspaß, Hernández-Campoy and Conde-SilvestreElspaß 2012b). This means that the supply of historical documents is by no means exhausted, and there remains much work for philologists to do using such combined methods, both on existing documents and on those yet to be discovered.
