oa De reductievocaal in zeventiende- en achttiende-eeuwse sailing letters - Onzichtbare spelling, dubbele spelling en palatale uitspraak

In this article, we examine two ways of spelling the reduced vowel in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letters and their possible link with its palatal pronunciation proposed by Caron. Contrary to claims made by Gaspar (2007), we show that the so-called invisible spelling should not always be straightforwardly interpreted as a reflection of a palatal sound. In the case of the double spelling an analysis of our sailing letters corpus leads to a hypothesis about the regional distribution of this phenomenon and reveals a possible connection with the German or Scandinavian background of particular scribes.