Abbreviations have been an important qualitative means for dating and localising manuscripts. In digital scholarship, however, they have received less attention. Reasons for this range from digital resources inheriting editorial traditions from print to normalisation being a prerequisite for many research questions. The aim of this paper is to build bridges by giving an overview of scholarship into digital and quantitative approaches -taking into account English, French, Old Norse and, to a lesser extent, Dutch, German and Celtic scholarship. It also makes a theoretical contribution by placing abbreviations into a typology of writing systems and proposing that the terms conditioned and unconditioned variation in analogy with phonology could be useful for studying abbreviation.

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This paper introduces a new project, Digital Editions for Corpus Linguistics (DECL), IntroductionThe Digital Editions for Corpus Linguistics (DECL) project aims to create a framework for producing online editions of historical manuscripts suited for both corpus linguistic and historical research. This framework, consisting of a set of guidelines and associated tools, is designed especially for small projects or individual scholars. A completed DECL edition will, in effect, constitute a lightly annotated corpus text. In addition to a faithful graphemic transcription of the text itself, DECL editions will also contain information about the underlying manuscript reality, including features like layout and scribal annotation, together with a normalised version of the text. All of these features, encoded in standoff XML, can be used or ignored while searching or displaying the text.DECL was formed by three postgraduate students at the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG) at the University of Helsinki in 2007. We shared a dissatisfaction with extant tools and resources, believing that digitised versions of historical texts and manuscripts generally failed to live up to expectations. At the same time, we recognised that digitisation was time-consuming and complicated, and thus compromises had been made in the creation of digital editions and corpora. In order to alleviate these problems, we began the design of a user-friendly framework for the creation of linguistically oriented digital editions created using extant standards, tools and solutions.The first three DECL editions will form the bases for the doctoral dissertations of the writers. Each of these editions-a Late Medieval bilingual medical handbook (Alpo Honkapohja), a family of 15th-century culinary recipe collections (Ville Marttila), and a collection of early 17th-century intelligence letters (Samuli Kaislaniemi)-will serve both as a template for the encoding guidelines for that particular text type and as a development platform for the common toolset. The editions, along with a working toolset and guidelines, are scheduled to be available within the next five years.

This paper presents key aspects of the data, methods and uses of the From Inglis to Scots Corpus (fits; Alcorn et al. [eds], 2021 –), complementing Kopaczyk et al. (2018) and focussing on the diachronic dimension of the resource. The corpus reconstructs sound values for individual Older Scots morphological root elements of Germanic origin as attested in the documentary record in the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (laos). This is done by triangulating the attested spelling, the sound values proposed in the literature for their etymological sources (dialects of Old English, Old Norse and Middle Dutch), and a series of plausible sound changes leading from the latter to the former (the Corpus of Changes). The challenges and possibilities of this approach are highlighted throughout, focussing on the diachronic mapping of Older Scots sounds to their origins and the intervening changes. An overview of the corpus's capabilities is provided in tandem with its limitations.

PALAEOGRAPHY has been defined as 'dating and localizing manuscripts by establishing patterns in the development of characteristic letter forms and abbreviations'. 1 The traditional means for dating and localising has been archival work by individual scholars who have acquired a high level of familiarity and competence in scribal practices. However, it has also been suggested that these approaches based on the authority of an experienced scholar could be enhanced by more quantitative methods developed for historical dialectology. Wakelin notes the following: Dialectology can help by identifying spelling patterns, and it might identify variation in script styles as well as in spelling. But so far only a few suggestions have been made, such as a tendency to form þ in different ways in the north and south of England in the fourteenth and 1