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Joanna Bugaj
School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
Email: jbugaj at ifa dot amu dot edu dot pl

A V or not a V? Transcribing abbreviations in fifteen MSS of the “Man of Law’s Tale”.

In his 1956 paper, Angus McIntosh argued for the study of written Middle English, which then can shed light on Middle English dialectology. When a great part of our understanding of Middle English comes from 19 th-century editions, now computerised and searchable, it is advisable to check this knowledge against manuscripts, trying to represent faithfully the linguistic information embedded in scribal conventions. But whether this task is achieved, will depend on the resolution of such problems as, for instance, how to render abbreviations in a consistent and unbiased manner.

This paper stems from the observations made during transcribing the “Man of Law’s Tale” as a part of the Canterbury Tales project. The project aims to construct an electronic colleatable version of Chaucer’s work on the basis of all extant manuscripts (the School of English at Adam Mickiewicz University is one of the partner institutions involved).

One of the decisions which need to be taken during the transcription process is how to represent abbreviations. As the policy of the project is to keep as close to the MS as possible, taking care to record all textual and scribal idiosyncracies, transcribers often decide how to render a particular abbreviation shape in their electronic version of the text. The idea is not to expand the abbreviation but rather to represent a particular shape by a consistent transcription convention, as if we were providing littera for a range of figurae, to use Donatus’ terms, recently refreshed in the context of spelling interpretation by Laing and Lass (2003: 258-259).* It has to be admitted, though, that in such a decision there lies a certain degree of interpretation, for instance when it comes to what a particular shape stands for, and whether it is the same underlying variant as in the case of other abbreviation shapes. The problem is that very often medieval scribes are not as neat in their exectution of abbreviation characters as we would like them to be. Often the shapes used are far from the handbook versions of manuscript conventions (e.g. found in Petti (1977: 22-24)) and the decision becomes a matter of interpretation.

In this paper, I am going to concentrate on abbreviations standing for <r+V> or <V+r>, which should typically be rendered by means of a superscript V or a hook (in the case of <er>/<re>). The database consists of 15 manuscripts of the “Man of Law’s Tale”, thanks to which one can compare the abbreviating conventions and preferences of different hands. After presenting an overview of abbreviation typology found in the MSS (after Petti 1977: 22), I am going to align the abbreviating conventions with their respective transcription counterparts to see whether the preconceived selection of transcription procedures withstands the demands of the text. Special attention will be paid to problematic cases of how to classify a given abbreviating shape.

* The question of potestates, the sound hidden behind the letter, falls outside the focus of this paper. One should, however, appreciate the repercussions of inconsistent or mislead transcription procedures in the interpretation of the underlying phonetic value of abbreviations.

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