Scribes as Agents of Language Change / / ed. by Esther-Miriam Wagner, Ben Outhwaite, Bettina Beinhoff.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DGBA Backlist Complete English Language 2000-2014 PART1
• MitwirkendeR: Beinhoff, Bettina,; Berg, Ivar,; Bergs, Alexander,; Bondarev, Dmitry,; Busse, Anja,; Dolberg, Florian,; Khan, Geoffrey,; Nevalainen, Terttu,; Outhwaite, Ben,; Reif, Stefan,; Schiegg, Markus,; Stenroos, Merja,; Wagner, Esther-Miriam,; Williams, Mark A.,; Wright, Roger,; Zair, Nicholas,
• HerausgeberIn: Beinhoff, Bettina,; Outhwaite, Ben,; Wagner, Esther-Miriam ,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter Mouton, , [2013]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in Language Change [SLC] , 10
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (328 p.) :; Num. figs. and tabs.

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- 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 sixteenthcentury scribal community -- 16 Language change induced by written codes: a case of Old Kanembu and Kanuri dialects -- Index