Orthography in the early books printed in English
Hanna Rutkowska
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
In this paper I will compare the orthography of several editions of the English translation (by William Caxton) of Jacques Legrand's Livre de bonnes moeurs. Caxton published his work, entitled The book of good maners, in 1487. The other editions subject to this analysis were printed by Richard Pynson (1494 and 1500) and Wynkyn de Worde (1498, 1507 and 1526). For the purposes of the analysis, a sample of 6,000 words was taken from each edition. This was possible thanks to Early English Books Online (at http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo/), a still ongoing project carried out by the Universities of Michigan and Oxford, rendering accessible, through one comprehensive database, the facsimiles of many thousand books published in English between 1475 and 1700.
The main focus of the paper will be the discussion of de Worde's and Pynson's orthographic systems as well as the orthographic alterations that they introduced in Caxton's translation. Although the editions were all based on the same translation, they show important differences and varying degrees of consistency as regards the orthographic systems employed. This concerns, for example, the distribution of <i> and <y>, the doubling of letters, punctuation, and the use of abbreviations and contractions. However, all the editions display some obvious similarities such as, for example, the consistent distribution of <v> and <u>, and the relatively low level of homography. These last two features seem particularly conspicuous when compared with the extensive orthographic variation and the high level of homography found in handwritten documents dating from the same period (late fifteenth and early sixteenth century). In order to highlight the most important differences in this respect, I will make some comparisons between the printed texts in question and the manuscripts of selected personal letters (of the Cely, Stonor, Paston, and Plumpton families). The aim of this discussion and comparison is to determine the degree of consistency, orthographic standardisation and variation in the selected printed and handwritten English texts in the fifteenth century.
The study presented in this paper is part of a larger project that aims at analysing the orthographic systems of the early printers of books in English.
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