THE SCRIPTING OF THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES

From spoken to written word

The scripting of West Germanic
West Frankish
Old English
Old High German
Old Saxon

Corpus of the present study
Old English sources
Early Anglo-Saxon charters
The Épinal glossary
The Old English material in Bede's Ecclesiastical History
Later Old English sources
Old High German sources
Early Old High German glosses
Vocabularius Sti Galli
Part Ka of the Old High German Abrogans glossary
OHG Isidore translation
Later Old High German sources
Old Saxon sources
Old Saxon Creed
Later Old Saxon sources

Spelling problems
The consonants of the West Germanic languages
Scripting with the Latin alphabet

HISTORICAL GRAPHEMICS

Methodological problems of graphemic research
"Deficiencies" of writing
The reading process
Circular reasoning

Phonographic and morphographic

Method and terminology
The concept of the sound position
Characters, graphs and graphemes
Quantification and the concept of the leading graph
Some methodological consequences and problems

GRAPHEMIC ANALYSIS I: MISSING LETTERS

Outline

Gmc. */w/ in OE, OHG, OS
Phonology
Sound positions
Old English
Old High German
Old Saxon
Summary and conclusions

Gmc. */þ/ in OE, OHG, OS
Phonology
Sound positions
Old English
Old High German
Old Saxon
Summary and conclusions

Gmc. */?/ in OE, OS, OHG and Gmc. */k/ in OHG
Phonology
Sound positions
Old English
Old High German
Old Saxon
Summary and conclusions

Gmc. */b/ in OE, OS, OCFr
Phonology
Sound positions
Old English
Old Saxon
Summary and conclusions

Spellings for OHG /tz/ and /zz/ (< Gmc. */t/)
Phonology
Sound positions
Old High German
Summary and conclusions

GRAPHEMIC ANALYSIS II: "SUPERFLUOUS" LETTERS

Outline
The letter k
The letter q
The letter x
The letter z
Summary and conclusion

RESULTS

Towards a history of spelling
Old English
Overview
Contextualisation of analysed texts
Old High German
Overview
Contextualisation of analysed texts
Old Saxon
Summary and conclusion

Variability of early medieval scripts
Measures of variability and consistency
Consistency and the identification of leading graphs
Summary and conclusion