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Category Archives: 19th-century letters
A linguistic close-reading of Jane Austen’s Letter 10
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics “No new letters by Jane Austen have been found since the publication of the third edition in 1995,” Deirdre LeFaye concludes in her introduction to the fourth edition of Jane Austen’s … Continue reading
Posted in 19th-century letters, letter writing
Tagged Jane Austen, Jane Austen's language, Jane Austen's letters, OED
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On Late Modern English spelling: an appendix to Marco Condorelli, Introducing Historical Orthography (2022)
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
On Late Modern American English
Just out: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (University of Leiden), Acquiring epistolary literacy in nineteenth-century New England, published last Friday in Volume 16 of Token, A Journal of English Linguistics. Interested? You can read and download the article here.
Posted in 19th-century letters, letter writing, news
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Cassandra’s last wishes
Cassandra Elizabeth, Jane Austen’s sister (1773–1845), not only left a Will but also a private document in the form of a letter to her brother Charles, in which she specified who were to inherit her most prized personal possessions. The contents … Continue reading
Jane Austen on the death of her sister Cassandra. Huh?
Looking up Jane Austen in Amy Froide’s book Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (OUP, 2005), I encountered a somewhat bizarre reference. The author quotes from a letter by Jane Austen addressed to a niece. The niece was Fanny … Continue reading
On Intra-writer Variation
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
In favour of intensifiers
And here is Ekaterina Krokhina’s second blogpost, nicely continuing her findings after the first. A good example of work in progress. I am really very much indebted to you for your well-filled and very interesting letter (1832; Charlotte Brontё to … Continue reading
On the history of most
I’m teaching a course on Late Modern English letters this semester, for which all participants (as in earlier courses on the subject) have to write two blog posts on a topic relating to what we’re doing in the course. Here … Continue reading
An MA course on Late Modern English letters
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
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The Mary Hamilton Papers available online
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 John Rylands Library, Mary Hamilton
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Late Modern English letters 