The Spelling Practices of Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns

Abstract

This chapter addresses: the problems of discussing the orthography of Scots in the Modem period (i.e. since 1700); the use of corpus-informed methods to describe Modem Scots orthography; and the orthographic practices of two canonical eighteenth-century writers, Allan Ramsay and Robert Bums.Keywords: orthography, Scots, Scottish literature, Allan Ramsay, Robert Bums, corpus linguisticsThe study of orthography is notoriously fraught with difficulties.1 Traditionally, accounts of orthography focus on letters of the alphabet, which can be considered in relation to their name (nomen), their appearance (figura) and their sound (potestas, or 'power'). Thus the letter in Standard English has a name, various appearances in manuscript and print (a, a), and different sounds in words like and when they are pronounced with a non-rhotic English accent. In a pioneering discussion of an early attempt to use a corpus to untangle the complexities of Standard English orthography, Venezky explains the limitations of the traditional approach, and observes that orthographic practices are the outcome of two sets of patterning.2 The first set of patterns constrains the allowable sequences of letters, or graphemes. Graphemes can be individual letters, or combinations of letters such as or . The second set of patterns maps spellings onto sounds.The situation is complicated enough when orthography is considered in relation to a codified, stable, standard variety of language and one particular accent that is used as a general point of reference. Venezky used a corpus of the 20,000 most common Standard English words to identify spelling-to-sound correspondences based upon the position of consonant and vowel clusters. The difficulties intensify when the orthography is of an unstable, evolving variety like Modem Scots, that is, Scots of the period after 1700. The written forms of Scots in the Modem period are generally considered to be a hybrid variety, drawing on the orthographic practices of Standard English while marking their difference from it in a variety of ways. The constraints on letter combinations have to be reconsidered in this context, as does the mapping of graphemes onto phonemes. The present chapter offers some indication of how the analysis of selected texts from the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing may shed light on the developing orthography of the Modem Scots period by considering the orthographic practices of two canonical writers of the eighteenth century, Allan Ramsay and Robert Bums.Older Scots orthographyIn her discussion of the origins of Older Scots orthography, Kniezsa begins by lamenting the lack of material on the history of English orthography in general, dubbing it 'one of the most neglected areas of its historical analyses'.3 From her own original research on Scots, as well as pioneering corpus-based research by Meurman-Solin, and earlier philological studies by such as Aitken, Agutter, Craigie, and Slater,4 Kniezsa plots out the main orthographic features of the Older Scots period. She presents an inventory of vowels and consonants of the period immediately preceding the Modem Scots period (Table 1), based on a sample of poetic and prose texts. These orthographic features can be considered in terms of their graphemic patterning, and the possible letter-to-sound correspondences. For example were inherited from Latin script; in Scots, they could be used as part of digraphs with and to give . The way these digraphs mapped onto sounds changed over the Older Scots period, as Aitken discusses in considerable detail.5 Aitken employs a numbering system to identify vowels as they change value from Early to Modem Scots; for example the graphemes , , or in words like stane and airt map onto Aitken's Vowel Number 4, which is realised as /a:/ in Early Scots (to 1450), then as /e:/ in Middle Scots (1450-1700). …