Shute, R.J. (2016) Pressed for Space: The Effects of Justification and the Printing Process on Fifteenth-Century Orthography. English Studies (98). pp. 1-21. ISSN 0013-838X
Abstract
There is a long-held belief that, prior to the standardisation of written English, printers altered spellings to justify their type. I investigate this claim through an analysis of spelling changes in William Caxton’s two editions of the Canterbury Tales—by examining text within one book, written by one author, and set by one compositor, the only difference between the sections of verse and the sections of prose should be the requirement for justification within the latter. Were the compositors altering spellings to justify their type, we would expect to see a greater number of altered spellings in the prose sections of text. This is not what the results of this study show—instead there is no statistically significant difference between the frequency of spelling changes in justified and non-justified text. However, there is a significantly higher number of abbreviations introduced into the justified text. These results suggest that the compositor of Caxton’s second edition Canterbury Tales did not change spellings to justify his type.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Printing; incunabula; language; linguistics; orthography; justification; typography; William Caxton; Richard Pynson; Canterbury Tales; Reynard the Fox; spelling; fifteenth century; English language; compositors |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 31 Aug 2016 08:08 |
Last Modified: | 12 Apr 2017 11:31 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2017.1250197 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/0013838X.2017.1250197 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:104200 |