In contrast to the regularity of the letterforms in hand-produced Old English manuscripts, the scribal spacings show great variation in both size and positioning. Examination of the spacings in the Tollemache manuscript of Alfred’s Orosius reveals extensive patterning which can be shown to correspond with such linguistic features of the text as syntactic structures as they are identified by immediate constituent analysis. Thus, the manuscript provides graphic evidence of non-segmental features of the language which before were only indirectly inferable.
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