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Lesson 2: Orthography and Spelling.

The period covered by the EEBO corpus (roughly 1400-1700) is one in which spelling was not as stable as it is in the present day. As a result of this, one word could have a number of forms, and it is necessary to keep this in mind when conducting a corpus search. For example, the word love also appeared with <u>, as in loue, but its other variants include leoue, lowe, lowfe and lovue. When searching for a specific lexical item, it is always advisable to consult a reliable source, such as OED Online, for all the possible forms (spelling variants) available in the given period.

Special symbols

Although the orthography of Early Modern English is very similar to that which we use today, there are several letters, mostly from Old English, which are no longer in use in Present day English.

  • the long <ſ>, which was a variant of the short <s>, could appear anywhere in a word except in the final position, for example in moſt (most), notwithſtandyng (notwithstanding), firſt (first), Chriſt (Christ), oppreſſed (oppressed)
  • the runic letter “thorn” < þ>, representing the dental fricative, was a possible alternation of the digraph <th>, for example þaet (that). It is still present in the modern Icelandic alphabet and therefore accessible via the inbuilt Icelandic keyboard in Kontext (Íslenska).
  • representing the open front vowel is the letter “ash” <æ>, also available on the Icelandic keyboard (Íslenska)

EEBO_pic01.png The Icelandic keyboard contains the symbols for “thorn” and “ash” which we may need especially when searching in older sections of the corpus

Spelling

feature description
<v> and <u> there was no distinction between <v> and <u>; they were variants of a single letter, for example in vntill (until), euill (evil), giue vp (give up)
<y> and <i> the letters <y> and <i> were frequently interchanged to represent the close front vowel [i], such as rayne (rain)
<i> and <j> apart from representing the close front vowel , <i> also functioned as a variant of the consonant letter <j>, hence the forms ielous (jealous) and iust (just)
double consonants doubling of consonants was common when preceded by short vowel, for example in chinnes (chins), eternall (eternal), bagge (bag – the vowel was still short in Early Modern English)
<y> and <þ> <y> could also represent the dental fricative, which had previously been written with the runic symbol thorn <þ>, for example ye olde folk (the old folk)
silent <e> the silent <e> at the end of words, usually marking a preceding long vowel, but also sometimes appearing as a relic of inflectional suffixes, found for example in plucke (pluck), speake (speak), feare (fear)

There are many other, albeit minor, categories of formal variation, for example:

  • the elision of certain letters, for example in suffred (suffered)
  • length in hée (he), séemeth (seems)
  • the letter <o> frequently represented the sound which we often write as <u>, for example ſommer (summer)
  • the postalveolar fricative [ʃ] (the initial sound in shoe) was occasionally represented by the letter <c>, such as in nacions (nations),
  • the syllable ←ic> was often spelt ←ick>, such as in publick (public)

As a result, we are faced with forms such as vnleſſe (unless), punniſhing (punishing) and lykewyſe (likewise)

Constructing the query

In order to secure as many permutations as possible, the query can be written in CQL (Corpus Query Language) using a number of regular expressions. Furthermore, the CQL query mode in the KonText interface is case sensitive, and therefore both variants should be included in the query in order for us to obtain as many relevant hits as possible. See several examples below: [word=“[dD][eiy][uvw][iy]nn?e?”] Frequency > Node forms provides a listing of all types found with the given query in order of frequency. EEBO_pic02.png

A more extreme example is with the word godly: Godly: [word=“[gG]oo?dle?[yi]c?k?e?”] This gives us the frequent forms godly, goodly, godlie, godlye and goodlye, but also much less frequent (and much less anticipated) variants such as godlyc and even godlycke. In the latter we can observe remnants of the Old English adjectival suffixes ←līc> and ←līce>.

Task: Spelling variants

Na konkrétním případu si ukažme, jak rozdílné výsledky jednotlivé asociační míry poskytují.

  • Find as many spelling variants of the word royal as possible
  • Keep in mind the spelling conventions and irregularities mentioned above
  • Make sure that the Query type is set to CQL