[Comment from William Tozier, who had trouble signing in (anyone else having difficulty?)]:

This is actually a difficult and frequent problem at Distributed Proofreaders. My wife and I recently scanned and uploaded 1749 English translations of Voltaire's Zadig and Crébillon's The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans. Most of the works people at DP see are from the 19th C. Not just the long s, but the use of italics, the colon-dash, the expanded contractions... all were troublemakers for us (and still are, since the projects are taking inordinate extra time).

People just balk. Or impose their own preconceptions. We wrestle with proofreaders who change some effs to esses, some esses to effs, and those in subsequent rounds of proofreading who change them back. Some of them. One person changed every occurrence of "of" on a page to "os". Another made it clear they thought that long esses never occur in italic text.

At DP, because the goal is electronic availability and not strict preservation, we have adopted a few editorial rules: we close up contractions like "would n't" and "they 're", and modify punctuation a bit, here and there. But you always always get somebody on a project who has never encountered one before, and who hasn't read the site-wide guidelines very well, who thus asks why there are so many "typos" on the page.

"Viz" is a stumbling block for many readers, as is "&c". The difference between 2em deletion dashes and 1em pause dashes is lost on many. The use of gesperrt text for emphasis, while infrequent in English-language works, is a firm blockade when it does crop up.

And don't get me started on the occasional thorns, hwairs, and suchlike that crop up in some scholarly works. And then, and then... well, modern Reformed Spelling. Egad. I have here in our queue a government-printed guide to the Dewey Decimal classification scheme... written in 20th Century Reformed American Spelling. I cannot imagine the project-management horrors this will provoke.

I shudder.

I wonder if this is all because of the prescriptivist mode of English language education. People never question whether the rules they've learned were always held as true.

Which, when you get right down to it, is a pretty general statement about humanity.

Scribbled by mjones at November 5, 2005 11:14 AM | Permalink

In re: to m jones, I wonder if this is all because of the prescriptivist mode of English language education. People never question whether the rules they've learned were always held as true.

This is not something I had really considered until I took a History of the English Language course in graduate school. The one sticking point that consistently killed class discussion was the inability to get past non-normative spelling. Several students weren't able to identify word as being the same if it was spelled differently throughout the text.

When I took the second section of the course, it was the journalism grad students who really put their finger (or my finger, an it were) on the problem: they argued that there is one and only one "correct" form of English, and that is whatever the grammar book tells us is correct.

That was definitely an eye-opener, and has helped me deal with people who come to the reference desk at the library, complaining about the overabundance of "f" in certain texts.

I gave an English translation of The Courtier as part of my Early Modern exam. I always expect difficulties with the language, and suggest that students read things aloud, as it can help (at least it helped me when I had to read 16th c. German). But I'm now wondering if it's too hard for my freshmen -- this quarter, I've seen in all of my classes an inability to identify authorship (in this case, they couldn't tell from the preface that it was a translation -- despite the fact that the textbook mentions the damned thing as having been written by an Italian...) or the kind of work it was -- apparently the default category is 'novel' -- also for collections of poems.

Also just venting -- oh, but maybe you could remind your senior that German orthography requires the capitalization of nouns??

Seriously, though -- maybe we should talk about how to provide students with the basics in ways that engage them a bit more without feeling like we're pandering? Something for a teaching carnival?

Most students have to struggle to accept the idea that conventions change, and that the hard-and-fast rules they learned in high school (if, indeed, they learned them there) are the result of a historical process. It's a big intellectual step. (I suspect that some resistance to evolution has the same origin.)

As for the long s, for modern students it is a great example of what the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel called a "breaching experiment," in which subjects are exposed to something that doesn't fit their normal categories. In one experiment, he used cards (like a red King of Spades). They see something that looks like an "f" (because the lack of a full crossbar is not a salient detail for them) but is where an "s" ought to be. That is enough to stop many of them in their tracks. Some go beyond that to the "folk knowledge" belief that people used to use f's instead of s's. You have to patiently point out that the two characters are, in fact, different.

And don't get me started on the "novel." Actually, I think for a lot of students, "novel" is a residual category. For them, schoolbooks are either textbooks or novels. If it is not a textbook, it is a novel. Both are written by the elusive yet prolific "they."

(Oh good, you turned of the Typepad authentication -- it kept claiming I was signed in and then not allowing me to comment!)

When I read this post, I had a couple of thoughts, and the first one was: don't they have to read Chaucer in Middle English? (Of course, they haven't necessarily taken that class before getting to you.) You'd think they'd find 18th century spelling/printing habits easy in comparison! But maybe the Middle Ages is so strange to them that they accept the weird spelling of Chaucer, but balk at strangeness in other periods.

My other thought was: my god, what are my own students going to do when I give them the new Norton edition of Malory's Morte Darthur, which not only preserves the 15th c. spelling, but puts all the proper names in bold, gothic-style script in order to evoke the rubricated names in the manuscript. They're going to freak, that's what!

In that class one of the continuing themes is going to be the manuscript and later print contexts of what we read. I'm hoping to teach students something about the material history of texts alongside the content of them. I'm going to blog about the idea at some point and then maybe keep people posted on how it's going next semester.

Oh, and appropos to what Kris said, do y'all know that column in the newspaper (in the Parade magazine insert) by Marilyn Vos Savant, who apparently has the world's highest IQ? Anyway, I can't remember what she was responding to, but she once said something along the lines of "if language didn't change we'd still be calling the earth by the Old English word 'eorthan.'"

*smacks head against desk*

Dr. Virago:

I hadn't seen that column, but Marilyn vos Savant makes my head hurt. We have a reference library here who could-- and has-- proven several of her claims wrong with a simple OED search.

But it's that sort of thing that sticks in people's heads (another example is trying to explain where certain regional pronunciations come from-- no, *adding* a vowel doesn't really happen because people are lazy...), and I wonder how we get around that on a casual, non-classroom basis.

Kris: yeah, Marilyn v. S. makes my head hurt, too. In fact, I think I even wrote to her to tell her she was an idiot -- er, mistaken -- on that one (and I was only a grad student then). And yet, I still read her column. Go figure. (And she had to have made up that name, right?)

Anyway, more substantively, I have no idea how to deal with these problems outside of the classroom without sounding like a pedantic ass. But *in* the classroom -- where being a pedantic ass is allowed :) -- I find a short history of the word "nice" is a good way to explain language change in a nutshell (from phonological to lexical issues). Plus it has the added benefit of making my students never want to use the word again!

And back on topic, if students grasp that writing/spelling/printing is merely a representation of speech, secondary to it, maybe they'll be less freaked out by the changing conventions over time. And MJ: I know you want to have time to get to the content of the texts you teach, but I wonder if a little material history -- especially how a given text ended up in their hands -- might make students feel more connected to the material.

Well, I guess I'll find out next semester!

Dr. V:

Good points all. I ask about "outside the classroom" because, although I'm an academic and teach some classes, I'm actually a librarian by vocation. It's difficult to find the right way to catch students.

Kris: yes, that is a pickle. I'm afraid I don't have any immediate ideas for a general plan of action, though maybe individual cases would provide "teaching moments"?? Ack - wish I had more!

Sometimes it is best to stop and put yousself in the othes pesson's shoes. I realize that these simple pasagsaphs ase sather difficult to get thsough, but I am simply tsying to make my point.

I located an authentic newspapes clipping about the Boston Massacse, and with a two paragsaph sample, found that fos evesy lettes f, there wese fous ligatuses which today, we would use the lettes s.

So let's all turn to page one, and see how easy it is to keep yous concentsation when suddenly, the language that you think you know, makes no sense on the page. With the same sate of substitution, the lettes r has been replaced with s.

Save yous judgement until quiz os test time, and maybe stast by explaining what a ligatuse is, explaining that it is NOT the letter F, and explain that it takes a little getting used to, and to get out of having to do tonight's homewosk assignment, who thinks they can sead a full page aloud without stumbling? Let's see some hands.