From Inglis to Scots: Mapping Sounds to Spellings (FITS)
Corpus under construction
Currently under construction, this corpus will survey the variation in spelling within the earliest recorded period of Scots (based on the data in LAOS). The objective is to elucidate the language’s underlying sound system, via the orthographic alternations within the Germanic morphemes of the corpus, as well as suggesting how their sound and spelling features developed from proposed sources. As in the case of CoNE, the corpus of forms (here the spelling and sound values of Germanic root-morphemes in LAOS) is accompanied by a corpus of changes tracing the attested forms back to a proposed source. The FITS team are Bettelou Los (PI), Rhona Alcorn (Co-investigator), Warren Maguire (Co-investigator), Joanna Kopaczyk (RA), Benjamin Molineaux (RA), Alpo Honkapohja (RA), Pia Lehecka (PG-RA) and Vasilis Karaiskos (Programmer).
During the original grant, Daisy Smith, a doctoral candidate on the project, explored the orthographic variation across the inflectional morphology of the same LAOS data. Her dissertation: ‘ye saidꝭ lettreʒ: The orthographic representation of inflectional morphemes in Older Scots’ can be found here.
The FITS project is funded by AHRC grant number AH/L004542/1 (for period 2014-2018).
A final version of the corpus is due to be published in 2025.