Spelling in the history of English: medieval and modern

I have been working on the history of English spelling, focusing on different periods in the history of English.

Etymological spelling in Middle and Early Modern English

Etymologizing the spelling in the history of English is a fascinating area, which has attracted scholarly interest. I have published some papers, either alone or jointly with other scholars, on etymological spelling forms in Late Middle English and Early Modern English.

Uchida, Mitsumi & Yoko Iyeiri. 2023. “Etymological and Non-etymological Spellings of FALCON and SOLDAN (SULTAN) in Caxton’s Paris and Vienne and Some Related French Versions”. Kwansei Gakuin University School of Sociology Journal 140: 69-83. (Downloadable PDF)
Hotta, Ryuichi and Yoko Iyeiri. 2022. “The taking off and catching on of etymological spellings in Early Modern English: Evidence from the EEBO Corpus”, in English Historical Linguistics. Historical English in Contact. Papers from the XXth ICEHL, ed. Bettelou Los, Chris Cummins, Lisa Gotthard, Alpo Honkapohja and Benjamin Molineaux, pp. 143-163. John Benjamins.
Iyeiri, Yoko & Mitsumi Uchida. 2021. “Etymological Spellings in William Caxton’s Translations”. English Studies 102(8): 991-1001.
Iyeiri, Yoko. 2017. “The Spelling and Syntax of Doubt in Early Modern English: Variation and Latin Influence”, in Language Contact and Variation in the History of English, ed. Mitsumi Uchida, Yoko Iyeiri & Lawrence Schourup, pp. 43-60. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.

I have also presented a paper on the simplification of mm in Middle English woman at ICOME 12 in 2022. The dataset used in this study is MEG-C.

Iyeiri, Yoko. 2022. “Middle English Spellings of WOMAN: Findings Based upon the Middle English Grammar Corpus”, 12th International Conference on Middle English (ICOME 12), University of Glasgow, 24 August 2022. (Online presentation)

Standardization of English spelling in Middle English

Standardization of English spelling in the Middle English period is another area where I have been interested. Here I work mainly on variation in spelling in Middle English manuscripts and early printings. The shift from hit ‘it’ to it is one of my favorite research topics, for example.

Iyeiri, Yoko. 2018. “Interpreting Different Types of Linguistic Variation: hit and it in Middle English”, in The Pleasure of English Language and Literature: A Festschrift for Akiyuki Jimura, ed. Hideshi Ohno, Kazuho Mizuno, and Osamu Imahayashi, pp. 95-107. Hiroshima: Keisuisha.
Iyeiri, Yoko. 2013. “The Pronoun it and the Dating of Middle English Texts”, in Phases of the History of English: Selection of Papers Read at SHELL 2012, ed. Michio Hosaka, Michiko Ogura, Hironori Suzuki & Akinobu Tani, pp. 339-50. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

The loss of the doubling of m in woman is also interesting. I have examined how residual mm is distributed in the first item in MS Pepys 2125 in the following paper.

Iyeiri, Yoko. 2023. “Intra-text Variation as a Case of Intra-writer Variation: Middle English Scribal Behaviours, with a Focus on the Spelling Variation of WOMAN in MS Pepys 2125”, in Intra-Writer Variation in Historical Sociolinguistics, ed. Markus Schiegg and Judith Huber, pp. 473-490. Peter Lang.

Spelling forms from the Late Modern period onwards

For the past few hundred years, English spelling has been relatively stable, leaving at the same time some variability in orthographic forms. My book Benjamin Franklin’s English: Form to Function Analyses focuses mostly on various morpho-syntactic issues, but includes some discussion on English spelling. The section on choose discusses the alternation between the choose and chuse types from historical sociolinguistic-perspectives.