Category Archives: 18th-century letters

Just out!

Posted on February 13, 2025 by Ingrid Tieken

Interested in graphological aspects of Late Modern English letters? My article on abbreviation stops and related matters has just come out. With thanks to the editors for their excellent job. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostaded. 2025. Visual pragmatics and Late Modern … Continue reading →

Posted in 18th-century letters, news, spelling | Tagged , | Leave a comment

On Late Modern English spelling: an appendix to Marco Condorelli, Introducing Historical Orthography (2022)

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Ingrid Tieken

The book is a plea for paying more attention in linguistics curricula to historical orthography, and I couldn’t agree more. The book is well written, and in my view very accessible. Focusing on spelling systems worldwide, it also deals with … Continue reading →

Posted in 18th-century letters, 19th-century letters, spelling | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Sarah Fielding (1710-1768) in the history of English

Posted on April 30, 2024 by Ingrid Tieken

Recently, and to be honest a little unexpectedly, I was reminded of work I did about twenty-five years ago on the language of Sarah Fielding, the sister of, yes, but a novelist herself, as well as a scholar of Greek … Continue reading →

Posted in 18th-century letters | Tagged | Leave a comment

On Intra-writer Variation

Posted on December 7, 2023 by Ingrid Tieken

Earlier this year, a book was published, edited by Markus Schiegg and Judith Huber, called Intra-Witer Variation in Historical Sociolinguistics (Lausanne etc.: Peter Lang, 2023). In includes a substantial number of papers on a variety of different languages and on … Continue reading →

Posted in 18th-century letters, 19th-century letters, letter writing, news | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Frances Austin – a pioneer in historical sociolinguistics

Posted on October 30, 2023 by Ingrid Tieken

Last week, we received an uncharacteristically early Christmas card from Frances Austin. But the card was not to wish us a merry Christmas: it was accompanied by a note from her nephew to say that she had died on 30 … Continue reading →

Posted in 18th-century letters, letter writing, news | Leave a comment

Musical Correctness: “One Stroke and You’ve Consumed My Waking Days”

Posted on May 6, 2019 by Ingrid Tieken

And here is Ilse Stolte’s first blog post for the MA course Late Modern English Letters: In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical on Alexander Hamilton’s life (1757-1804) – aptly named Hamilton – a lot is said (or sung) about letters. One song … Continue reading →

Posted in 18th-century letters | Tagged | Leave a comment

An MA course on Late Modern English letters

Posted on January 3, 2019 by Ingrid Tieken

The coming semester, I will be teaching another MA course on Late Modern English letters. The aim of the course is for students at Leiden to learn all about letter writing during that period, including analysing the language of this … Continue reading →

Posted in 18th-century letters, 19th-century letters, news | Leave a comment

The Mary Hamilton Papers available online

Posted on December 2, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

Letters carefully transliterated from the Mary Hamilton Papers in the John Rylands Library are freely available to any interested reader. The corpus currently stands at 161 letters dated 1764-1819 – over 70,000 words of text. The Image to Text project … Continue reading →

Posted in 18th-century letters, 19th-century letters, letter writing, news | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Belle van Zuylen’s letters

Posted on March 25, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

The Belle van Zuylen Correspondence project is looking for volunteers to transcribe the letters (most of which are in French). Look at their blog (in Dutch) for more information.

Posted in 18th-century letters, news | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Periphrastic do and Colonial Lag

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

And since she sent me both blogposts all at once, here is Esther Spaanderman’s second one, also on the Adams Papers: “But as I speak french very imperfectly and she understands not a syllable of English I suppose she did … Continue reading →

More Galleries | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment