Wagner / Outhwaite / Beinhoff Scribes as Agents of Language Change

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61451-054-3
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 10, 336 Seiten

Reihe: Studies in Language Change [SLC]

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.

Zielgruppe

For anyone interested in empirical and theoretical approaches to language change, especially those interested in socio-historical linguistics, historical sociolinguists and historical pragmatics. General linguists as well, since all of the examples will be translated and glossed

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wagner, Esther-Miriam

Outhwaite, Ben

Beinhoff, Bettina

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Sprachsoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Soziolinguistik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Acknowledgements;5
2;Part I: Introduction;9
2.1;1 Scribes and Language Change;11
3;Part II: From spoken vernacular to written form;27
3.1;2 Biblical Register and a Counsel of Despair: two Late Cornish versions of Genesis 1;29
3.2;3 Medieval Glossators as Agents of Language Change;47
3.3;4 How scribes wrote Ibero-Romance before written Romance was invented;79
3.4;5 Hittite scribal habits: Sumerograms and phonetic complements in Hittite cuneiform;93
4;Part III: Standardisation versus regionalisation and de-standardisation;105
4.1;6 Words of kings and counsellors: register variation and language change in early English courtly correspondence;107
4.2;7 Quantifying gender change in Medieval English;129
4.3;8 Identity and intelligibility in Late Middle English scribal transmission: local dialect as an active choice in fifteenth-century texts;167
4.4;9 Lines of communication: Medieval Hebrew letters of the eleventh century;191
4.5;10 The historical development of early Arabic documentary formulae;207
4.6;11 Individualism in “Osco-Greek” orthography;225
4.7;12 How a Jewish scribe in early modern Poland attempted to alter a Hebrew linguistic register;235
5;Part IV: Idiosyncracy, scribal standards and registers;247
5.1;13 Writing, reading, language change - a sociohistorical perspective on scribes, readers, and networks in medieval Britain;249
5.2;14 Challenges of multiglossia: scribes and the emergence of substandard Judaeo-Arabic registers;269
5.3;15 Variation in a Norwegian sixteenth-century scribal community;285
5.4;16 Language change induced by written codes: a case of Old Kanembu and Kanuri dialects;299
6;Index;333

Über Autor(innen)

Esther-Miriam Wagner, Cambridge University, UK; Ben Outhwaite, Cambridge University, UK; Bettina Beinhoff, Anglia Ruskin University, UK