PRESTANDARD INDIVIDUAL MANUSCRIPT ORTHOGRAPHIC PECULIARITIES
In 19th century prestandard Lithuanian manuscripts, certain orthographic peculiarities stand out as both individual and not characteristic to prints.
(1) Audience. From 1827–1831 on Jurgis Pabrėža (1771–1849) developed his two different simultaneous orthographies: one for his projected standard secular writings, another for his religious texts. The more phonologically precise standard orthography was aimed at a more educated reader, while the other—at a less sophisticated common reader. Orthographies were shaped along the social lines, correlated with diverse social strata. Other types of “double” orthographies were analyzed in Osselton 1984; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1998.
(2) Symmetry of letters. Another author, Simonas Daukantas (1793–1864) preferred the capital letter [y] to mark both vowel [i] and consonant [y]. In his 1852–1856 dictionary, Daukantas did not use the capital , but to demonstrate he really meant the word‑initial [i] sound he often wrote a very huge lower case for a potential typesetter to choose for him. Supposedly it was duty of a printer to split the manuscript letter into and in print. Thus, authors might have allotted certain linguistic decisions for the social strata of printers.
(3) Aesthetics. Same Daukantas in certain segments of his History of Lithuanian Lowlands (1831–1834) correlated graphemes by their shape. After the letters with long vertical strokes he preferred elongated and (), while the shorter graphics of encouraged him to choose graphemes of smaller shape and <ę> () (for the same diphthong). These were aesthetically correlated graphic variants. Thin social stratum of potential readers might have influenced relaxed experiments in aesthetic orthography. (Cf. Voeste 2007).
Bibliography:
Osselton, Noel, 1984: “Informal Spelling Systems in Early Modern English: 1500–1800,” English Historical Linguistics: Studies in Development, 123–137.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid, 1998: “Standardization of English spelling: The eighteenth-century printers’ contribution,” Advances in English Historical Linguistics (1996), 457–467.
Voeste, Anja, 2007: “Variability and professionalism as prerequisites of standardization,” Germanic Language Histories ‘from Below’ (1700–2000), 295–307.
