The myth of "the Anglo-Norman scribe"

Clark, Cecily

doi:10.1515/9783110877007.117

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…See e.g.Skeat (1907: xiv-xxii);Arngart (1955: 31), but contrastClark (1992). On this see furtherLaing (1999: 259-61) and references.…”

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confidence: 98%

Shape-shifting, sound-change and the genesis of prodigal writing systems

Laing¹,

Lass²

2009

English Language and Linguistics

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In a series of articles we have looked at individual early Middle English writing systems and explored aspects of multivocal sound/symbol and symbol/sound relationships. This article combines previous observations with new material, and provides insights into the genesis of these relations and how they may interconnect. Since many early Middle English texts survive as copies, not originals, they may give clues to the orthographic systems of their exemplars too.We investigate the 'extensibility' of Litteral and Potestatic Substitution Sets. Writing systems may be economical or prodigal. The 'ideal' economical system would map into a broad phonetic or a phonemic transcription: that is, one 'sound', one symbol. In early Middle English there is no one standard written norm, so there is potentially less restraint on diversity than in standard systems. Further extensibility is built into the system. We show that much of what tends to be dismissed as 'scribal error' rather represents writing praxis no longer familiar to us -flexible matrices of substitution and variation.South of a line running roughly from the Mersey to the Wash, but excluding much of East Anglia, the distinction [between the functions of 'fl' and 'y'] was regularly maintained; north of this line, and also over much of East Anglia, 'fl' and 'y' were represented by the same (usually y-like) symbol. (LALME 3: xv) The figurae and may sometimes appear as end points of a cline: there is no systematic functional distinction made between -shaped, -shaped or formally indeterminate figurae, however many actual shapes the scribe employs (Benskin 1982: 14).There are therefore four types of scribal praxis in relation to 'fl' and 'y':(a) 'southern' / differentiation both in shape and function;b) 'northern' confusion where a single figura, usually -shaped but sometimes -shaped is used for both [T∼D] and [i∼j]; 4 4 The phonetic representation [i] stands for [i(:)], et passim.

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“…See e.g.Skeat (1907: xiv-xxii);Arngart (1955: 31), but contrastClark (1992). On this see furtherLaing (1999: 259-61) and references.…”

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confidence: 98%

Shape-shifting, sound-change and the genesis of prodigal writing systems

Laing¹,

Lass²

2009

English Language and Linguistics

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“…examined on many occasions, using both orthographic (Benskin 1982;Clark 1992;Laing 1999) and lexical data (Kornexl & Lenker 2011;Lenker 2014;etc. ), and illuminated by palaeographic and corpus-linguistic approaches.…”

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confidence: 99%

Royal chancery after 1066

Timofeeva¹

2022

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This paper explores linguistic and sociolinguistic mechanisms that facilitated collaboration between English and Norman administrators in the decades following the Norman Conquest. First, a community of royal and episcopal chancellors and scribes is reconstructed from historical and documentary sources and their ties and networks are described. In the second step, two subcorpora are used to illustrate the processes of lexical selection and focusing in their common professional language, Latin: royal writs of William I and circuit returns of the Domesday inquest for the South-West. Both parts of the study demonstrate high involvement of Norman actors in the leading bureaucratic positions but, at the same time, point to their wide collaboration with the local administrative and scribal personnel. As a result, the two vernaculars are mutually enriched with new professional vocabulary, while in the written Latin standard, common to both, compromise lexical features emerge.

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“…Spelling errors involving h -are noted, but they are not considered sufficient evidence for [h]-loss, being dismissed by attributing them to '(Anglo-)Norman' scribes. The general validity of this treatment of errors, however, has been very convincingly questioned by Clark (1992), who labels it as a 'myth'.…”

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Were they ‘dropping their aitches’? A quantitative study of h- loss in Middle English

Crisma¹

2007

English Language and Linguistics

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In this article I present extensive quantitative evidence showing that it is possible to distinguish different Middle English varieties on the basis of the treatment of word-initial h-, and that it is necessary to postulate that, in some varieties, word-initial h- fails to surface in given contexts, though being present as a consonantal phoneme in the underlying representation. This casts a new light on the old problem of whether word-initial h- was lost in Middle English and restored at a later stage: the data presented here suggest that h- loss was never generalized, though h-less forms did surface as contextual variants of h-ful forms.

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The myth of "the Anglo-Norman scribe"

Cited by 7 publications

References 4 publications

Shape-shifting, sound-change and the genesis of prodigal writing systems

Shape-shifting, sound-change and the genesis of prodigal writing systems

Royal chancery after 1066

Were they ‘dropping their aitches’? A quantitative study of h- loss in Middle English

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