2012-04-05

ewx: (Default)
2012-04-05 09:19 am
Entry tags:

Old English and Its Closest Relatives

Addendum to previous post: don’t get the electronic version; someone did an especially terrible job of converting it from paper. Faults include:

  • Some of the non-ASCII characters are represented as images. This means that they don’t scale with the rest of the text, leading to a bizarre appearance.
  • Most of the tables are represented as images. Not only does this have the same scaling problem as above but worse, the ones that started out life as a full page aren’t very high resolution, making them quite hard to read.
  • Some of those images are the wrong one.
  • Some of the text is wrong, for instance there’s the occasional “p” for “þ”.
  • The ancient texts are missing hyphens at intraword line breaks, which are nevertheless preserved from the paper version, presenting an additional challenge to would-be translators. If I wanted to puzzle out essentially typographical issues I’d have gone to the originals!

Most of this is, in principle, user-fixable but it’s a lot of work. I bought a second-hand paper copy.