Gudelia Rodríguez Sánchez

UNIVERSIDAD DE SALAMANCA

Contrast in the Writing System of Three Scribes: The Owl and the Nightingale

The main linguistic result of the Norman Conquest was the cessation of English  as  an official language and, following continental usage, the official replacement of English by Latin. Since not only Latin but also French came to be the languages of public life, French influence also came into play and affected English writing practice. Nevertheless, West-Saxon literary tradition continued for a time in some of the great monasteries and was not forgotten; but gradually as less writing in English, the  old written standard was eventuually partially abandoned. In the absence of a national written standard, those who still wrote in English felt themselves free to make their writing reflect more closely their actual speech by means of the combination of Franco-Latin conventions with reminiscences of the OE ones. We may say that the graphemes became again roughly phonetic; the writers, released from the restrictions of a prescribed OE standard, once again could reflect in their writings a simple and relatively consistent correspondence between graphic symbol and sound.  In this way, the 12th and 13th centuries mark the beginning of a new English spelling practice, a new English orthography.
 The Owl is preserved in two manuscripts: in MS Cotton Caligula A IX in the British Museum copied in the first half of the 13th century and in MS Jesus College 29, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, regarded as dating from the latter half of the 13th century.

There are a number of facts that seem to indicate that MS. Jesus was copied from the same original as MS  Cotton.  As is usual in the period, none of the scribes follow  consistent orthographic norms; the same word may appear spelled in  two, three or four different ways, however there exist in their spellings clear and marked graphic tendencies which identify and particularize their way of writing.

It is not the first time that we ´visit´  The Owl and the Nightingale but for reason of space we had to put a stop in 1996  to the exposition of our analysis and  the rest had to be reduced to silence in that paper. It is our aim now to continue with  the differences between the scribes' spelling practices which we have observed to  show the amount of variation which might be introduced into a text in the course of transmission. Incomplete transmission from one system to another is obviously great in the three scribes. A comparison with earlier and later stages in the history of English writing  allow us to qualify certain spelling practices as more or less innovative. Some of the spelling conventions in both MSS are firmly anchored to their period and will become progressively rare in the course of time and eventually fall in disuse; by contrast, others seem to be the source of later graphic developments. In  this paper we try to analyse and contrast the different spellings we find in The Owl and the Nightingale as the result of the overlaying of one orthographic tradition upon the other,  French and Latin ones especially, and the native tradition which was never entirely lost,  all these three mostly being the ones we have in Modern English orthography.