Visualising pre-standard spelling practice: understanding the interchange of <ch(t)> and <th(t)> in Older Scots

Molineaux, B., Maguire, W., Karaiskos, V., Alcorn, R., Kopaczyk, J. and Los, B. (2020) Visualising pre-standard spelling practice: understanding the interchange of <ch(t)> and <th(t)> in Older Scots. Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities, 2020, pp. 1-11.

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Abstract

Alphabetic spelling systems rarely display perfectly consistent one-to-one relationships between graphic marks and speech sounds. This is particularly true for languages without a standard written form. Nevertheless, such non-standard spelling systems are far from being anarchic, as they take on a conventional structure resulting from shared communities and histories of practice. Elucidating said structure can be a substantial challenge for researchers presented with textual evidence alone, since attested variation may represent differences in sound structure as well as differences in the graphophonological mapping itself. In order to tease apart these factors, we present a tool-Medusa-that allows users to create visual representations of the relationship between sounds and spellings (sound substitution sets and spelling substitution sets). Our case study for the tool deals with a longstanding issue in the historical record of mediaeval Scots, where word-final <cht>, <ch>, <tht> and <th> appear to be interchangeable, despite representing reflexes of distinct pre-Scots sounds: [x], [xt] and [θ]. Focusing on the documentary record in the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots ([LAOS, 2013]), our exploration surveys key graphemic categories, mapping their lexical distributions and taking us through evidence from etymology, phonological typology, palaeography and historical orthograpy. The result is a novel reconstruction of the underlying sound values for each one of the target items in the record, alongside a series of sound and spelling changes that account for the data.

Item Type:Articles
Additional Information:Article published in Special Issue on Visualisations in Historical Linguistics, pp. 1-11.
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Kopaczyk, Professor Joanna
Authors: Molineaux, B., Maguire, W., Karaiskos, V., Alcorn, R., Kopaczyk, J., and Los, B.
College/School:College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Language and Linguistics
Journal Name:Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities
Publisher:Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique
ISSN:2416-5999
ISSN (Online):2416-5999
Copyright Holders:Copyright © 2020 Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities
First Published:First published in Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities 2020:1-11
Publisher Policy:Reproduced under a Creative Commons License
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