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The detailed analytical work on early Middle English manuscript texts undertaken for the compilation of A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) has led to new insights into orthographic systems and their design. In a series of papers (Laing 1999, Laing and Lass 2003, Lass and Laing 2005, Laing forthc.) we have looked at individual writing systems and explored aspects of multivocal sound/symbol and symbol/sound relationships. This paper combines previous observations with new material, and provides insights into the genesis of these relations and how they may interconnect. Since most Middle English texts are the surviving manifestations of processes of copying, their interrelationships may give us information about the orthographic systems of their exemplars.
We also investigate the ‘extensibility’ of Litteral and Potestatic Substitution Sets. Writing systems may be economical or prodigal. The ‘ideal’ economical system maps one sound to one symbol. Few writing systems with evolutionary histories (that is, histories excluding massive centrally directed spelling reform) approach this ideal; even most modern so-called ‘standard’ systems have islands of prodigality. In Middle English there is no standard written norm and no prescriptive repositories; so there is potentially less restraint on multifunctionality than in standard systems, and the islands of prodigality may be larger and/or more numerous. Further extensibility is built into the norm. In addition to the complexity that this study reveals, it also demonstrates once again that much of what has in the past been dismissed as ‘scribal error’ rather represents types of unexceptionable writing praxis that are no longer familiar to us and/or the flexible use of matrices of substitution and variation.
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