Methodology
Why Functional Transcription?
The way I carry out the exercise of transcription is what I call “Functional Transcription”. What I mean by that is that my focus is on the phonemes that the recorded text represents, i.e. what sounds and sound combinations one would need to see in order to successfully read the text aloud. In essence, I am putting greater emphasis on phonemes than on graphemes.
What are Phonemes?
Phonemes are the sounds that comprise a language, and these sounds can be represented in a variety of ways across languages. In English, for example, the same sound can be made by the letters “S” in the word “Sea” and the letter “C” in the word “Cite”, or the letters “X” in the word “Box” and the combination of letters “CKS” in the word “Socks”. The phonemes, however, are the same in both the first sounds made when saying aloud “Sea” and “Cite”, as are the last sounds in the words “Box” and “Socks”. It is important to divorce the concept of the sound one makes with the letters that commonly represent those sounds, as those pairings are often inconsistent within a language, and especially inconsistent when looking at two different languages.
What are Graphemes?
Graphemes are visible written cyphers and symbols (what we commonly call letters) written to represent different phonemes in words. As above, the grapheme “C” begins the word “Cite” and the grapheme “S” begins the word “Sea”, even though both words begin with the same phoneme. Why are they different? In many languages, and especially in English, the rules of spelling are difficult and inconsistent because the language itself is a mixture of loan words going back to antiquity. What started with Celtic languages intermingling with Anglo Saxon / Old English, this began to morph once Latin and Greek was introduced to it in Britain, first by Roman settlers and then monestaries. More recently, Norman French played a huge part in both Britain’s power structures, which informed cultural differences, and thus linguistic changes. Even now in the present day, loan words are absorbed and used that originated in Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew (among countless others). English is at its base a Germanic language that has become a creole of added languages that has changed not only the spellings of things, but even the syntax and grammar of sentences. This is why spelling and grammar classes in school weren’t entirely straightforward, and learning English as a second language can be a great challenge.
What are Scribal Abbreviations?
Phonemes from celtic languages, germanic languages, Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish have wildly different graphemic representation. Add to this, then, the presence of scribal abbreviations, even in printed texts. Scribal abbreviations are shorthand symbols to denote the presence of more graphemes to finish a word, and are used to save space within a line. Such abbreviations were extremely common in handwritten manuscripts, especially as the scribe reached the end of the line and realized they had far less space than they had anticipated. In Latin, which was the common language of recording information in the medieval period (thanks mostly to the churches, which were the primary centers of education and literacy), scribal abbreviations were so common that at present there are extremely thorough guides for parsing it all. Texts written in lay languages (i.e. languages spoken by the common people) such as Middle English or Early High German still used scribal abbreviation as the printing press first became available, as it was an economical way to fit in as much information onto a page as possible. Such scribal abbreviations began to die out, as lay readers likely found such shorthand difficult. Understandably so – when scribal abbreviations originated they were taught to scribes and were meant to be read only by an audience also trained in such things. Lay people didn’t have such training and didn’t require it, as their writing consisted mostly of brief correspondence a few pages long rather than comprehensive tomes spanning hundreds of pages each.
What does this have to do with manuscript transcription?
I have chosen functional transcription / phonem-centric transcription simply because it’s easier for an audience to read. I want the work of these long-dead writers to be accessible to people who aren’t familiar with old techniques for recording language, not just in the translation but in the transcription. I want people to see what the text would have felt like and sounded like had the original writer read it aloud. I want the audience to be able to read these transcriptions aloud as well, to gain a better feel for the language of the time. I only take it so far – to truly make the text phoneme-centric would require a transcription using only IPA, or the International Phonetic Alphabet. Yet that also requires training that many don’t have (or don’t have yet), and so I am making the best compromise I can.
What qualifies me to do this work?
Aside from enjoying it, and thus having the wherewithal to not only begin but also complete large projects of this nature, I have a great deal of linguistic training in a variety of areas. I have a bachelor’s degree in Germanic languages and Literature, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature. Through those courses of study, I learned the fundamentals of German grammar, and thereby received a better foundation for English grammar, and I have studied the various methods and reasons why people have recorded information and shared it throughout history. I have also briefly studied Old English and Finnish and Spanish, and have taken graduate-level courses in Speech Language Pathology and Audiology, where I learned about how information is received and processed by the brain, both visually and acoustically. My efforts at university taught me how to learn new things, how to conduct sound research, how to analyse and synthesize the information found, and how to generate a robust conclusion in writing. Such an educational foundation has provided me with an understanding of not only how to make sense of the printed symbols of the text, but also how to infer meaning from the sequences of words, how to infer syntactical meaning based on context, and how to infer the meaning of abbreviations in printing and handwriting due to practical necessity.
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But as stated above, all of these skills mean very little if I don’t actually enjoy doing this work. It is difficult, frustration, time consuming, exacting, and tedious. It can be overwhelming, and often is. But the satisfaction of sussing out meaning from an ancient page and unlocking it for others to read and enjoy is difficult to describe, but it is bounteous. We live in the information age right now, but to presume there is no information worth knowing from previous eras is folly. If I could, I would transcribe and translate everything that has been preserved. Perhaps I will some day, if I have enough time! But for now I am focussing on what I can access with permission and that which I find most interesting.