Wherefore art thou, aberil?

[Mauro]

I got this article in my academia.edu feed today: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

It has no direct relevance to the VMS or to 'Aberil', but it discusses the challenges posed by the orthography and spelling of Medieval manuscripts and I found it interesting, ie.:

However, historical documents are difficult to analyze. They were handwrit- ten on skin (parchment) or paper. Over centuries, portions of those documents deteriorated physically which makes their writing difficult to decipher, even with help of advanced scanner and optical character recognition software. The writers of those documents are typically not known by name, and the context of their writing is often unclear from our contemporary point of view. European orthography was not standardized until about two centuries ago. In medieval Europe, manuscripts were often written to be read out loud rather than being studied quietly; the general public (including even some members of the political leadership) was mostly illiterate. Writing was restricted to impor- tant matters only, since the writing material was expensive to obtain. Moreover, the medieval world was to a large extent regionally confined, with only little trans-regional mobility, such that many regional customs, habits and dialects were preserved. These factors also contributed to the delay of standardization in orthography.

I would add that many European languages did not achieve a standardized orthography to this day (ie: just in Italy there are a couple dozen full-fledged languages whith no agreed-upon orthography and scant historical documentation).