Linguistic Characteristics of The Homilies
Despite certain limited reliance on Latin translations and quotations throughout the homilies, they remain an essential example of Old English prose writing. For the most part, the homilies appear in the late West Saxon dialect, but also incorporate several interesting departures from the form mandated by this dialect. To a certain extent, this may be attributable to the mechanical copying of the Vercelli scribe, but this seems to be an extremely limited possibility, given the breadth of differentiation. D.G. Scragg, the premier Vercelli scholar, follows unique instances of earlier or non-West Saxon spellings for words, and suggests that this may be due to the vast expanse of time from which the writings were pooled, and the fluid nature of Old English spellings (Scragg, The Vercelli homilies, 1992).
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