Scribes as Agents of Language Change

Description

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. Acknowledgements Part I: Introduction 1 Scribes and Language Change Part II: From spoken vernacular to written form 2 Biblical Register and a Counsel of Despair: two Late Cornish versions of Genesis 1 3 Medieval Glossators as Agents of Language Change 4 How scribes wrote Ibero-Romance before written Romance was invented 5 Hittite scribal habits: Sumerograms and phonetic complements in Hittite cuneiform Part III: Standardisation versus regionalisation and de-standardisation 6 Words of kings and counsellors: register variation and language change in early English courtly correspondence 7 Quantifying gender change in Medieval English 8 Identity and intelligibility in Late Middle English scribal transmission: local dialect as an active choice in fifteenth-century texts 9 Lines of communication: Medieval Hebrew letters of the eleventh century 10 The historical development of early Arabic documentary formulae 11 Individualism in “Osco-Greek” orthography 12 How a Jewish scribe in early modern Poland attempted to alter a Hebrew linguistic register Part IV: Idiosyncracy, scribal standards and registers 13 Writing, reading, language change - a sociohistorical perspective on scribes, readers, and networks in medieval Britain 14 Challenges of multiglossia: scribes and the emergence of substandard Judaeo-Arabic registers 15 Variation in a Norwegian sixteenth-century scribal community 16 Language change induced by written codes: a case of Old Kanembu and Kanuri dialects Index