Grapheme substitution in English and French as one of the stages of orthographic unification (based on the literary works)

Smakhtina Yuliya Vadimovna, Ageeva Anastasiya Vladimirovna, Yakhina Rusilya Raifovna

In Europe, the 17th and 18th centuries were marked with the active orthographic unification processes due to the spread of typography. The unification was divided into many smaller cases. The process of standardization of each of them was not homogeneous. This article is dedicated to substitution of the graphemes –y- and –i- in English and French. The unification processes do not take place simultaneously, in England it is the 17th c., in France it is the 18th c. However, it presents to be interesting how the identical phenomena develop in different intralinguistic and extralinguistic realities. The article is provided with the examples of the words marked with grapheme substitution at different stages of unification. In the end of the article you can find a concise table containing some intermediate and final results.

Keywords:orthographic norm, typography, standardization, written language.