John Cowan wrote:

>
> Peter T. Daniels scripsit:
>
> > > > (Pretty significant "repairs." You have imposed about a century of
> > > > orthographic change on the passage.)
> > >
> > > Umm, not exactly. I looked at the Furness Collection online facsimile
> > > of that page and copied it, changing long-s to s, i to j where modern
> > > orthography would, and u to v likewise.
> >
> > Exactly. Those are the three, highly significant, changes you
> > introduced. Long-s, which persisted to the beginning of the 19th
> > century, remains difficult for contemporaries; and i/j u/v make
> > 17th-century originals _very_ hard to interpret.
>
> All I can say is, I've never seen any 18th-century documents that looked
> anything like my modified First Folio (MFF) text. If you want to say
> there's a century, or two centuries, of change *in the use of those
> letters*, fine; but to say that the MFF is in 18th, still less in 19th,
> century orthography is preposterous.
>
> I could have explained to the First Folio printers exactly what I wanted
> in about five minutes (once they got over my barbarous accent), and they
> could have learned to do it easily if not entirely without errors. The
> MFF is in a close variant of their own (still rather chaotic) orthography.

I have no idea what you're going on about.

You presented a highly altered version of a First Folio passage as if it
were a fair representation of early-17th-century spelling, but it
wasn't.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...