Orthographies in Early Modern Europe

Orthographies in Early Modern Europe Orthographies in Early Modern Europe Edited by Susan Baddeley Anja Voeste De Gruyter Mouton An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libra- ries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libra- ries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org ISBN 978-3-11-021808-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-021809-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-021806-2 ISSN 0179-0986 e-ISSN 0179-3256 ThisISBN work 978-3-11-021808-4 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License, ase-ISBN of February (PDF) 978-3-11-021809-1 23, 2017. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-021806-2 LibraryISSN 0179-0986 of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ae-ISSN CIP catalog 0179-3256 record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. 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Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek ♾ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier ThePrintedBibliografische Deutsche in Germany Nationalbibliothek Information der Deutschen lists this Nationalbibliothek publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailedDie Deutsche bibliographic Nationalbibliothek data are verzeichnet available in diese the InternetPublikation at http://dnb.dnb.de.in der Deutschen Nationalbibliogra- www.degruyter.comfie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. Ą 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston Printing:© 2016 Walter Hubert de Gruyter & Co. GmbHGmbH, Berlin/Boston & Co. KG, Göttingen ϱ DruckPrinted und Bindung: on acid-free Duck & Co., paper Ortsname Printed♾ Gedruckt in Germanyauf säurefreiem Papier www.degruyter.comPrinted in Germany www.degruyter.com Contents Introduction Orthographies in Early Modern Europe: A comparative view. 1 Susan Baddeley and Anja Voeste Spanish Variation and standardization in the history of Spanish spelling . 15 Elena Lamas Pombo Italian Italian orthography in Early Modern times . 63 Andreas Michel French French orthography in the 16th century . 97 Susan Baddeley English Variable focusing in English spelling between 1400 and 1600 . 127 Terttu Nevalainen German The emergence of suprasegmental spellings in German. 167 Anja Voeste Swedish Variable norms in 16th-century Swedish orthography . 193 Alexander Zheltukhin Polish The standardization of Polish orthography in the 16th century . 219 Daniel Bunčić vi Contents Czech Religion and diacritics: The case of Czech orthography. 255 Tilman Berger Croatian On the creation of Croatian: The development of Croatian Latin orthography 269 in the 16th century. Roland Marti Hungarian 16th-century Hungarian orthography . 321 Klára Korompay Finnish Standardization of Finnish orthography: From reformists to national awakeners. 351 Taru Nordlund Index Rerum. 373 Index Nominum . 379 Introduction Orthographies in Early Modern Europe: A comparative view Susan Baddeley and Anja Voeste This volume brings together a series of articles written by specialists in the orthography of European languages, the aim of which is to promote a better understanding of the development of national orthographies in Europe during the pivotal period constituted by Early Modern times. The comparative view of European orthographic history that we propose here naturally cuts across language boundaries and across conventional fields of scholarly thinking focused on the respective Romance, Germanic, Slavonic and Finno-Ugrian language groups. It is therefore a new approach, but one which constitutes an important supplement to existing national perspectives on individual philologies that often tend to be teleologically constructed. The approach should also be of interest to language historians, both meth- odologically and theoretically, since European linguistic histories are based on a number of shared traditions (for an overview cf. Auroux et al. 2000– 2006) that have also influenced the development of national orthographies. Consider, for example, the establishment of universities, the invention of letterpress printing and its paths of diffusion, the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the Renaissance, Humanism and the En- lightenment, and the rise of modern nation-states: all of these developments are typical of this Europe; they have also left an indelible mark on its linguistic and orthographic history. In order to provide as balanced a view as possible of the linguistic situa- tion in Europe, we have selected three Romance, three Slavonic, three Germanic and two Finno-Ugrian languages from this cultural domain to serve as examples here. Each author has been given freedom of choice in the approach used to chart the history of the language in question, and the different approaches used reflect the different characteristics of each language. However, beyond these differences, the common ground shared by all of the languages appears clearly, occasionally with surprising parallels 2 Susan Baddeley and Anja Voeste to be seen in the histories of quite distinct orthographic systems used in regions which are geographically remote. At this point, it ought to be clear that the “Europe” we are talking about here is the geographical expanse which, in the aftermath of the Schism of 1054 under the Church of Rome, gradually developed into a unitary social and cultural sphere. The Latin Church constituted the encompassing element that bound together the individual secular dominions, and accordingly certain common features shaped developments throughout its sphere of influence. All of the languages described in our corpus now use the Latin alphabet, and only two of them (Croatian and Czech) ever used other alphabets. In most cases, the emergence of a written language itself was linked to the adoption of Latin Christianity. It is, therefore, easy to imagine how the course of development proceeded in the Early Modern period, when Latin continued to be the written language par excellence, in spite of the progres- sive rise of the vernaculars. Indeed we encounter in all the languages under consideration here oscillations between, on the one hand, traditional semiographic1 systems of spelling, often incorporating a strong Latinate element, and others indicating greater independence from Latin, i.e., pho- nographic systems of spelling. However, as the break with Latin became consummated, with the in- creasing independence of the phonological systems of these languages with regard to Latin, the first order of business – and this applies to all European languages – was to come up with a graphic expression of each vernacular’s respective linguistic peculiarities, and for “new” sounds unknown to the Latin phonological system, such as palatals and fricatives: for instance, the affricate consonants in Italian, the numerous affricates and sibilants of the Slavonic languages (such as Polish, which possessed a particularly rich phonological system, of which only a third could be adequately transcribed by the Latin alphabet), the eñe and elle in Spanish, or a differentiation of the e-grapheme in French that could stand for the closed and open e-vari- ants as well as the schwa. This gave rise to a great deal of experimentation, with a whole range of solutions frequently being found to overcome these problems: palatalization of consonants, for example, could be indicated by juxtaposing an <h>, a <g> or an <i>. A case in point is the former French palatal /ʎ/, for which at least 10 variant spellings existed during the medie- val period.2 Language contact in England and the influence of written French as a prestige language also saw the replacement of typically English letters such Introduction 3 as thorn (þ) and eth (ð) by Latin equivalents (although spelling reformers such as Sir Thomas Smith would, later, attempt to reintroduce them), and the adoption of a whole range of graphemes of French origin, such as <ou> for the long /u/ (which later transformed into a diphthong, as in the word house). Secondly, the so-called “silent letters” inherited from Latin (but which had become mute through phonetic erosion) were to be expunged, whereby <tractado> became the Spanish word <tratado> and <nocte> became <notte> in Italian.3 In Spanish and Italian notably, this ideal of phono- graphic “simplicity” was to prevail. However, throughout

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