{"id":2611,"date":"2013-10-01T15:42:18","date_gmt":"2013-10-01T15:42:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=2611"},"modified":"2014-11-11T18:09:00","modified_gmt":"2014-11-11T18:09:00","slug":"review-of-orthographies-in-early-modern-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=2611","title":{"rendered":"Orthographies in early modern Europe<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Orthographies in early modern Europe<\/strong>. Ed. by Susan Baddeley<\/strong> and Anja Voeste<\/strong>. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012. Pp. vi, 383. ISBN 9783110288179. $140 (Hb).
\nReviewed by David Elton Gay<\/strong>, Bloomington, IN<\/p>\n

The orthographies of many early modern European languages are well-known to students of these languages for their often difficult and misleading spellings. The languages have, typically, shifted from the middle to early modern stages of their development, yet the orthographies often fail to reflect that changes have occurred. Other languages are just being written, and these orthographies often pose puzzles of their own. This book looks at both languages with long histories of writing and some that are only just coming into writing in the early modern period, offering a guide to the complexities of the early modern orthographies of these languages.<\/p>\n

The book opens with a general essay on the orthographies and their problems by the editors.\u2019 After the introduction to the problems of early modern orthographies, the book moves to studies of orthographies of selected Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and Finno-Ugric languages. The essays of the first section look at Romance languages. Elena Lamas Pombo writes about \u2018Variation and standardization in the history of Spanish\u2019. Andreas Michel then takes up \u2018Italian orthography in Early Modern times\u2019, which is followed by Susan Baddeley\u2019s essay, \u2018French orthography in the 16th century\u2019. The book\u2019s second section deals with early modern Germanic languages. Terttu Nevalainen describes \u2018Variable focusing in English spelling between 1400 and 1600\u2019. Anja Voeste then offers a study of \u2018The emergence of suprasegmental spellings in German\u2019, and, finally, Alexander Zheltukhin describes \u2018Variable norms in 16th-century Swedish orthography\u2019. The third section then takes up the Slavic languages. Daniel Bun\u010di\u0107 looks at \u2018The standardization of Polish orthography in the 16th century\u2019. Tilman Berger then examines the intersection of religion and orthographies in \u2018Religion and diacritics: The case of Czech orthography\u2019. It is followed by Roland Marti\u2019s essay, \u2018On the creation of Croatian: The development of Croatian Latin orthography in the 16th century\u2019. The book\u2019s final section examines two Finno-Ugrian languages. Kl\u00e1ra Korompay\u2019s essay is on \u201816th-century Hungarian orthography\u2019, and Taru Nordlund\u2019s essay, \u2018Standardization of Finnish orthography: From reformists to national awakeners\u2019, then closes the book.<\/p>\n

Although the essays in the book are somewhat inconsistent in their quality, the book does an important service for historical linguists in highlighting the importance of orthography and other philological and textual issues in the study of early modern languages. The essays remind historical linguists and others about the importance of editing and textual criticism in the interpretation of early modern texts. The texts that historical linguists use are typically the regularized editions of modern scholars, which sometimes differ in linguistically significant ways from the manuscript and early printed versions that are the basis for the editions. This book is a very useful guide back to the originals of these texts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Orthographies in early modern Europe. Ed. by Susan Baddeley and Anja Voeste. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012. Pp. vi, 383. ISBN 9783110288179. $140 (Hb). Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Bloomington, IN The orthographies of many early modern European languages are well-known to students of these languages for their often difficult and misleading spellings. The languages […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2611"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2611"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2672,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2611\/revisions\/2672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}