Table Of ContentOrthographies in Early Modern Europe
Orthographies
in Early Modern Europe
Edited by
Susan Baddeley
Anja Voeste
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-028812-4
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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 dur-
ing 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 lin-
guistic 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 lan-
guage. 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 ele-
ment 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 the Middle Ages,
norms were quite diffuse in most languages, and this allowed for the pres-
ence of widespread variation, an essential part of the medieval “mental
architecture” according to the French linguist Claude Buridant, but one
which has not always been perfectly understood by language historians.
The 16th century was to inherit this complex orthographical situation,
which, in many cases, was to become yet more complex before certain
norms and standard practices could even begin to prevail.
The Early Modern period in Europe is associated with a certain number
of movements which affected the whole of the area: humanism and the
rediscovery of the Classical tradition, the Reformation, the rise of vernacu-
lars and the supplanting of Latin as the only language in the church and for
learning, the introduction and development of letterpress printing, and the
rise of modern nation-states, all of which impacted in different ways upon
the development of the written vernaculars according to local circumstances.
As Sylvain Auroux (1994) has pointed out, the vast production of tools
to learn and to teach the vernacular languages such as dictionaries, gram-
mars and manuals, led to an increasing “grammatization” of the written
language. Moreover, with the rediscovery of Greek (and to a lesser extent,
of Hebrew), written languages other than Latin could be taken as a model
for orthography, and could lend solutions to the myriad problems of writing
many vernacular languages. In Italy, Trissino’s Castellano of 1529 showed
the influence of Greek scholarship, and he attempted to use Greek letters
both to resolve the inadequacies of the Latin alphabet and to confer greater
prestige upon the written vernacular. Erasmus’ defence of the vernaculars
and his appeal for people of all nations to be able to read the Scriptures in
their own language also encountered widespread support throughout Europe,
and authorities such as Quintilian and Priscian were widely drawn upon as
models for describing vernacular languages and codifying their written
systems. In Spain, the role of the great humanist scholar Antonio de Nebrija
4 Susan Baddeley and Anja Voeste
would be fundamental in this respect; in other countries, the importance of
other less well-known “globetrotting humanists” would be no less impor-
tant.
The other key intellectual and spiritual movement that swept through
Europe was, of course, the Reformation. It is well known that religion has
always been a key force promoting the production of written texts and the
way in which they are received. Siegfried Morenz, a historian of religion,
distinguishes between “book religions” and “cult religions”; accordingly,
Christianity can be classified as a book religion, since its foundation is a
book (the Bible), which is something it has in common with other religions
including Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. Nevertheless – and this is a fact
which has far-reaching consequences – its scripture is not considered to be
literally the word of God. In contrast to the Koran, for instance, its verbatim
wording is not considered to be purely a divine revelation. And, according
to historian Michael Mitterauer, it was precisely this specific set of circum-
stances that provided sufficient latitude to work on the Holy Scriptures. For
the language historian, this means: enough leeway to transpose them into
other forms, to copy them, to translate them, to produce literary revisions
and adaptations and, later, to use the printing press to duplicate them on a
mass scale.4 This is something that would seem to be a matter of course,
but most definitely is not.
Compare this, for example, to Islam, whose holy book, as the word of
God, is sacred and thus unalterable. The Koran is bound not only to a single
language, Arabic, but also to the handwritten text that has been handed
down through the ages, and thus to a specific set of characters and signs.
Under these circumstances, a tradition of vernacular translations as well as
literary revisions and adaptations failed to emerge. And despite the fact that
the technique had long been known, letterpress printing did not establish
itself in the Islamic world until the 19th century. Instead, an elaborate cal-
ligraphy was very widespread there.
In Europe, the translation and printing of the Scriptures into the ver-
nacular was one of the main aims and achievements of the Lutheran Re-
formation. In Sweden, printed editions of the Bible established a fairly
fixed type of orthography from quite an early date. However, these initia-
tives did not always go unopposed. In France, as in many other European
countries, reformed spellings at this time were largely connected with Prot-
estantism and with the wish to make the written language more widely
available to audiences with little or no command of Latin. The Protestants
promoted literacy and education, and were well aware of the role of ver-
naculars and the importance of letterpress printing in the promulgation of
