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.