: Esther-Miriam Wagner, Ben Outhwaite, Bettina Beinhoff
: Scribes as Agents of Language Change
: De Gruyter Mouton
: 9781614510543
: Studies in Language Change [SLC]ISSN
: 1
: CHF 124.00
:
: Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft
: English
: 336
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: PDF
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The majority of our evidence for language change in pre-modern times comes from the written output of scribes. The present volume deals with a variety of aspects of language change and focuses on the role of scribes. The individual articles, which treat different theoretical and empirical issues, reflect a broad cross-linguistic and cross-cultural diversity. The languages that are represented cover a broad spectrum, and the empirical data come from a wide range of sources. This book provides a wealth of new data and new perspectives on old problems, and it raises new questions about the actual mechanisms of language change.



Esther-Miriam Wagner, Cambridge University, UK;Ben Outhwaite, Cambridge University, UK;Bettina Beinhoff, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
Acknowledgements5
Part I: Introduction9
1 Scribes and Language Change11
Part II: From spoken vernacular to written form27
2 Biblical Register and a Counsel of Despair: two Late Cornish versions of Genesis 129
3 Medieval Glossators as Agents of Language Change47
4 How scribes wrote Ibero-Romance before written Romance was invented79
5 Hittite scribal habits: Sumerograms and phonetic complements in Hittite cuneiform93
Part III: Standardisation versus regionalisation and de-standardisation105
6 Words of kings and counsellors: register variation and language change in early English courtly correspondence107
7 Quantifying gender change in Medieval English129
8 Identity and intelligibility in Late Middle English scribal transmission: local dialect as an active choice in fifteenth-century texts167
9 Lines of communication: Medieval Hebrew letters of the eleventh century191
10 The historical development of early Arabic documentary formulae207
11 Individualism in “Osco-Greek” orthography225
12 How a Jewish scribe in early modern Poland attempted to alter a Hebrew linguistic register235
Part IV: Idiosyncracy, scribal standards and registers247
13 Writing, reading, language change - a sociohistorical perspective on scribes, readers, and networks in medieval Britain249
14 Challenges of multiglossia: scribes and the emergence of substandard Judaeo-Arabic registers269
15 Variation in a Norwegian sixteenth-century scribal community285
16 Language change induced by written codes: a case of Old Kanembu and Kanuri dialects299
Index333