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This paper presents key aspects of the data, methods and uses of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) Corpus (Alcorn et al., 2021–), complementing Kopaczyk (2018) and focusing on the diachronic dimension of the resource. The corpus reconstructs sound values for individual Older Scots morphological root elements of Germanic origin as attested in the documentary record in Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS). This is done by triangulating between the attested spelling, the sound values proposed in the literature for their etymological sources (dialects of Old English, Old Norse and Middle Dutch), and a series of plausible sound changes leading from the latter to the former (the Corpus of Changes). The challenges and possibilities of this approach are highlighted throughout, focusing on the diachronic mapping of Older Scots sounds to their origins and the intervening changes. An overview of the corpus’ capabilities is provided in tandem with its limitations.

The advent of ever-larger and more diverse historical corpora for different historical periods and linguistic varieties has led to the impossibility of obtaining simple, direct-and yet balanced representations of the core patterns in the data. In order to draw insights from heterogeneous and complex materials of this type, historical linguists have begun to reach for a growing number of data visualisation techniques, from the statistical, to the cartographical, the network-based and beyond. An exploration of the state of this art was the objective of a workshop at the 2018 International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, from whence most of the materials of this Special Issue are drawn. This brief introductory paper outlines the background and relevance of this line of methodological research and presents a summary of the individual papers that make up the collection.

Alphabetic spelling systems rarely display perfectly consistent one-to-one relationships between graphic marks and speech sounds. This is particularly true for languages without a standard written form. Nevertheless, such non-standard spelling systems are far from being anarchic, as they take on a conventional structure resulting from shared communities and histories of practice. Elucidating said structure can be a substantial challenge for researchers presented with textual evidence alone, since attested variation may represent differences in sound structure as well as differences in the graphophonological mapping itself. In order to tease apart these factors, we present a tool-Medusa-that allows users to create visual representations of the relationship between sounds and spellings (sound substitution sets and spelling substitution sets). Our case study for the tool deals with a longstanding issue in the historical record of mediaeval Scots, where word-final , , and appear to be interchangeable, despite representing reflexes of distinct pre-Scots sounds: [x], [xt] and [θ]. Focusing on the documentary record in the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots ([LAOS, 2013]), our exploration surveys key graphemic categories, mapping their lexical distributions and taking us through evidence from etymology, phonological typology, palaeography and historical orthography. The result is a novel reconstruction of the underlying sound values for each one of the target items in the record, alongside a series of sound and spelling changes that account for the data.