Marco Condorelli (dir.), Advances in Historical Orthography,
c. 1500–1800

Publication Year: 2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL: http://cambridge.org/9781108458504

The early modern period is a key historical era for the standardisation of languages in Europe, in which orthographies played an important role. This book traces the development of European spelling systems in the early modern era, and is unique in bringing together several strands of historical research, across a diverse range of Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages, including Polish, German, French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Czech, Croatian and English. Whilst each chapter includes a case study on a particular language or script, the volume in general follows a broad thread of discussion based on models and methods relevant to many languages, showing how empirical approaches can be applied across languages to enrich the field of historical orthography as a whole. The first volume to diachronically explore the standardization of spelling systems from a cross-linguistic perspective, this is an invaluable resource for specialists and those interested in historical European studies more broadly.

Table of Contents

1. From the early modern era to an international research area Marco Condorelli
2. A phonological-graphemic approach to the investigation of spelling functionality, with reference to early modern Polish Tomasz Lisowski
3. Graphematic features in Glagolitic and Cyrillic orthographies: a contribution to the typological model of biscriptality Per Ambrosiani
4. The emergence of sentence-internal capitalisation in Early New High German: towards a multifactorial quantitative account Lisa Dücker, Stefan Hartmann and Renata Szczepaniak
5. French and Spanish punctuation in the sixteenth-seventeenth century grammars: a model of diachronic and comparative graphematics Elena Llamas-Pombo
6. Orthographical variation and materiality of a manuscript: prestandard Lithuanian spellings in Simonas Daukantas’s History of the Lithuanian Lowlands (1831–1834) Giedrius Subaèius
7. Investigating methods: intra-textual, inter-textual and cross-textual variable analyses Anja Voeste
8. Orthography and group identity: a comparative approach to studying orthographical systems in early modern Czech printed and handwritten texts (c.1560–1710) Alena A. Fidlerová
9. Orthographical solutions at the onset of early modern Croatian: an application of the grapholinguistic method Mateo Žagar
10. Women’s spelling in early modern English: perspectives from new media Melanie Evans and Caroline Tagg
11. Towards a relativity of spelling change Marco Condorelli
12. Synergic dialogue in historical orthography: national philologies, comparability and questions for the future Marco Condorelli and Anja Voeste..