IMC 2017: Sessions
Session 243: 'Dame Ortography taught lettres and how men shuld wryte': Medieval Writers and Their Spelling
Monday 3 July 2017, 14.15-15.45
| Organiser: | Christine Wallis, School of English, University of Sheffield |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Nigel Bibby, School of History, University of Leeds |
| Paper 243-a | Scribal Scribbles: Visible and Invisible Notes in an Anglo-Saxon Manuscript (Language: English) Index terms: Education, Language and Literature - Old English, Literacy and Orality, Manuscripts and Palaeography |
| Paper 243-b | How Accurate is Orm's Spelling? (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Old English, Language and Literature - Middle English, Literacy and Orality, Manuscripts and Palaeography |
| Paper 243-c | Not My Type: A Computational Approach to Identifying Caxton's Compositors (Language: English) Index terms: Computing in Medieval Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English, Printing History |
| Abstract | With no standardised spelling, medieval English is particularly amenable to linguistic approaches seeking to uncover the relative influences of personal systems and external models on orthographical practice. Wallis contextualises spelling choices in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript's newly-discovered dry-point notes, while Seiler compares the selection and consistency of Orm's graphemic inventory with similar issues of sound representation faced by the earliest Old English writers. Shute's mathematical and computational linguistic approaches uncover the influence of Caxton's typesetters in shaping early printed texts. This panel furthers our understanding of the orthographical practices of a variety of little-studied medieval text shapers (e.g. readers, linguistically-aware writers, and compositors). |