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This corpus-based study examines the orthographic systems in thirteen editions of the Kalender of Shepherdes (1506-1656), a comprehensive compendium of prose and verse texts of different length and on a variety of subjects, for example, astronomy, agriculture, medicine, and religion. It focuses on the variation and consistency levels in the early-modern printers' spelling practice, and evaluates the potential importance of extra-linguistic motivation for the identified regularising changes from the language authorities of the time, including lexicographers, spelling reformers, orthoepists, grammarians, and schoolmasters. Additionally, the book provides the reader with a brief overview of the printers' punctuation, capitalisation, and word-division conventions, as well as with selected bibliographical and textual information concerning the publication history of the Kalender of Shepherdes.
List of contents
Contents: Early Modern English - Standardisation - Early printed books - Corpus linguistics - Orthography - Typography - Abbreviations - The distribution of graphemes - Vowel length indication - The reduction of homography - Morphological spelling - Etymological spelling.
About the author
Hanna Rutkowska is lecturer in the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan (Poland). Her main research interests include the history of English, Late Middle English and Early Modern English graphemics and morphosyntax, corpus linguistics, and historical sociolinguistics.
