
Contents
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7.1 Preliminaries 7.1 Preliminaries
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7.2 Alphabets 7.2 Alphabets
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7.2.1 Fundamentals 7.2.1 Fundamentals
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7.2.2 Diacritics 7.2.2 Diacritics
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7.3 ‘Defects’ and Functionality 7.3 ‘Defects’ and Functionality
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7.4 Why Phonemes and Graphemes are Usually Unhelpful 7.4 Why Phonemes and Graphemes are Usually Unhelpful
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7.4.1 Introduction 7.4.1 Introduction
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7.4.2 Economy, Prodigality, Littera, and Substitution 7.4.2 Economy, Prodigality, Littera, and Substitution
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7.4.3 Substitution Sets 7.4.3 Substitution Sets
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7.4.4 Knowing What a Word is in Order to Read it: ‘s’ in Trinity Scribe B 7.4.4 Knowing What a Word is in Order to Read it: ‘s’ in Trinity Scribe B
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7.4.5 Where ‘emes’ Fail: Trinity Scribe A 7.4.5 Where ‘emes’ Fail: Trinity Scribe A
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7.5 Phonetic Interpretation 7.5 Phonetic Interpretation
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7.5.1 How Can we Know about Potestates? 7.5.1 How Can we Know about Potestates?
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7.5.2 Level of Resolution 7.5.2 Level of Resolution
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7 Interpreting Alphabetic Orthographies: Early Middle English Spelling
Get accessRoger Lass is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town and Honorary Professorial Fellow in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. His main interests are historical linguistics, history of the English language, philosophy of linguistics, and evolutionary biology. Selected publications include On Explaining Language Change (1980, CUP), Old English: A Historical Linguistic Companion (1994, CUP), Historical Linguistics and Language Change (1997, CUP). He was editor of and author of the introduction and the chapter 'Phonology and morphology' in the Cambridge History of the English Language volume III, 1477-1776 (1999, CUP).
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Published:06 January 2015
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Abstract
This chapter is designed to show some of the special properties of older, non-standardized orthographies, with nearly exclusive emphasis on early Middle English. In particular it shows that ‘emic’ analysis tends to break down, as the writers were rarely interested in biuniqueness or full representation, captured lexical diffusion in process, and did not use notions like phoneme and grapheme. Many of them were working in a way best characterized in terms of the Classical theory of littera. The paper deals with the typology of ‘economical’ and ‘prodigal’ systems, the nature of litteral substitution, and the kinds of evidence necessary to assign broad surface phonetic values to graphs in ancient systems.
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