Category Archives: 18th-century letters

Dont vs. don’t: early American usage?

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

Esther Spaanderman is the last of my students who owes us her blogposts. Here is the first one: A while ago, I studied periphrastic do in the letters of John Adams (1735-1826), the second president of the United States. As … Continue reading →

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

The Adams Family Papers

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

The Adams Family is a popular topic in this blog. Here is another blogpost on them, Martijn Slokker’s last one:  When I wrote my course paper, I worked with the Adams Family Papers, an electronic archive which contains (among other … Continue reading →

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

Jane Austen: a very polite correspondent

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

Merel Kohsiek’s second blog post is on a comparison between the language of Charlotte Brontë and that of Jane Austen: For my analysis of the language of grief in Charlotte Brontë’s letters (see also my previous blog post), I did a … Continue reading →

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

Politeness strategies in valedictions

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

Epistolary fomulas were clearly a popular topic during last semester’s course on Late Modern English letters. Here is what Klazien Tilstra wrote about themin her second blogpost: This is not the first blog post on opening and closing formulae in Late Modern … Continue reading →

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

A final Adieu

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

Ilse Daalhof wrote the following blogpost, on the correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, which she has been studying: In the week we were looking at opening and closing statements of letters, I stumbled onto what appeared to me a unique closing … Continue reading →

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

The Bluestocking Corpus to be published in 2015

Posted on January 11, 2015 by Emily Maas

A few days ago Anni Sairio published an exciting blog post on Dynamics of Change in Language Practices and Social Meaning (1700–1900). She announced that The Bluestocking Corpus will probably be published in 2015! What is even more exciting is … Continue reading →

Posted in 18th-century letters, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

English by Dutch people

Posted on December 5, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Elsewhere in this blog, I’ve described a project which studies this use of English by Late Modern native speakers of Dutch. Here is a very interesting example of such a letter, in a blogpost by Marlies Reitsma, another student in … Continue reading →

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

Some interesting findings about Capitalization

Posted on December 2, 2014 by anarevan

This is Benjamin Kennicott (1718-1783), a biblical scholar, who took it upon himself in the 1760s to collate Hebrew manuscripts that were written prior to the invention of printing. For this purpose, the sum of £10,000 (around £750,000 in modern … Continue reading →

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

New letter by Lowth

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

A new letter by Robert Lowth (1710-1787) has come to light. Read more about it here.

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

ESL in the Late Modern Netherlands

Posted on November 10, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Today we are visiting the Dutch Royal Family Archives in The Hague, to be able to study the English letters the former Dutch queen Wilhelmina wrote to her governess Miss Saxton Winter. An edition of the letters was published in 2012, … Continue reading →

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