Spelling variation in historical text corpora: The case of early medieval documentary Latin
Timo Korkiakangas
Spelling variation seems to go hand in with grammatical certain historical texts. This article presents a method of quantifying spelling as linguistic variable whose relation relevant and contextual variables can be statistically measured. Based on the normalization non-standard word forms subsequent calculation edit distance between normalized attested forms, is applicable morphologically tagged text corpora here tested an early medieval documentary Latin corpus notable variation. To justify proposed method, several methodological issues both philological technical nature are discussed. The latter part illustrates potential by way case study relationship use prepositions examining chronological its context. There appears significant dependence prepositions. It also argued that diachronic distribution may indicative reform, addition reflecting already known administrative change relative scribal practices. Thus, proves offer interesting insights into reality underlying corpus.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities