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from Part IV - Empirical Approaches
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2023
This chapter explores the connections of orthography to paleography and codicology, and the dependence of historical orthography on the materiality of writing and printing environments. It explains that orthography is one of the tools of paleographers, and a key to understanding (deciphering) the written language of ancient and medieval texts, whereas codicologists investigate nonlinguistic (and nonorthographic) peculiarities of early manuscript books (codices). Orthographic research, however, in some cases helps estimate more precisely the origins of codices (time and location). The chapter also presents some of the ways in which the materiality of writing and printing historically has directed the development of orthographic features (e.g. symmetricity of upper and lower cases, dependence on the limitations of printers’ type sets). The author introduces the dichotomy between the perceived durability and perishability of a text at its creation phase, and reveals its impact on the differentiation of orthographic approaches such as the historical simultaneous double orthographies of various European languages (i.e. printed versus handwritten manuscripts, books versus newspapers).
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