3 ms·

Most people find it hard to read books with long s, for example, or even know what long s is or where it occurs. "Why are all the s's replaced with f's?" people

Most people find it hard to read books with long s, for example, or even know what long s is or where it occurs. "Why are all the s's replaced with f's?" people will ask. It's fine if it's "ash-tray" instead of "ashtray", but the further you go back and the more of these archaicisms you encounter, the more of a barrier they become to ordinary readers (instead of English majors). I don't necessarily like this kind of textual modernization, but in general it's necessary to keep the text accessible to moderns.

throwanem 9y ago
I'm not sure I can agree–seeing 'ſ', where I'd ordinarily expect to see 's', was briefly confusing at first, but I quickly derived from context what it must mean, and found my surmise confirmed in further perusal of older texts. On the other hand–I'm not sure that someone, who has written an Emacs minor mode to perform automatic ſ-insertion where it is grammatical to do so, is necessarily best placed to speak to the general case here.
- derefr 9y ago
  I don't think the parent poster was talking about being confused as to the meaning; rather, they're talking about the presence of these characters impeding fluent reading speed even after one knows what they are. Enough of these changes and you feel like you have dyslexia, a bit: you have to consciously analyze each word on the page to extract its "reading", rather than just letting your visual cortex pass the words straight into your brain's audio loop.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    Seems like it'd be just a matter of developing fluency, the same way as with any other orthography. Adding one new glyph isn't that big a problem for someone who's already likely to be reading texts where long-s is found - so, at least, has been my experience, and while I always hesitate to generalize therefrom, I don't know that it's so unreasonable to consider doing so here.
Chaebixi 9y ago
> Most people find it hard to read books with long s, for example, or even know what long s is or where it occurs. That's not old-fashioned spelling or hyphenation: that's old-fashioned typography.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > That's not old-fashioned spelling or hyphenation: that's old-fashioned typography. A critical difference, because once you've corrected OCR errors so that you correctly have the spelling-as-in-original, but not done any “modernization”, there is no issue with long-s to addres.s

throwanem 9y ago

I'm not sure I can agree–seeing 'ſ', where I'd ordinarily expect to see 's', was briefly confusing at first, but I quickly derived from context what it must mean, and found my surmise confirmed in further perusal of older texts. On the other hand–I'm not sure that someone, who has written an Emacs minor mode to perform automatic ſ-insertion where it is grammatical to do so, is necessarily best placed to speak to the general case here.

derefr 9y ago
I don't think the parent poster was talking about being confused as to the meaning; rather, they're talking about the presence of these characters impeding fluent reading speed even after one knows what they are. Enough of these changes and you feel like you have dyslexia, a bit: you have to consciously analyze each word on the page to extract its "reading", rather than just letting your visual cortex pass the words straight into your brain's audio loop.
- throwanem 9y ago
  Seems like it'd be just a matter of developing fluency, the same way as with any other orthography. Adding one new glyph isn't that big a problem for someone who's already likely to be reading texts where long-s is found - so, at least, has been my experience, and while I always hesitate to generalize therefrom, I don't know that it's so unreasonable to consider doing so here.

Chaebixi 9y ago

> Most people find it hard to read books with long s, for example, or even know what long s is or where it occurs. That's not old-fashioned spelling or hyphenation: that's old-fashioned typography.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> That's not old-fashioned spelling or hyphenation: that's old-fashioned typography. A critical difference, because once you've corrected OCR errors so that you correctly have the spelling-as-in-original, but not done any “modernization”, there is no issue with long-s to addres.s