Today's scribblings were those of people writing several centuries in the past. The documents right now are fairly legible, but they're also written in the vernacular, rather than the Latin I'm used to, so there's a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary where I just have to guess at the word. I've transcribed thirty lines of these scribbles -- took me about two hours. I'd like to establish a pace of fifty lines a day, but I'm going to have to work up to it, because boy, am I ever out of practice.
Tomorrow comes the harder scribblings: my own. I'm trying to practice the "write every day" thing, which is really, really hard when I'm at the beginning of a new project that has nothing to do thematically with the stuff I spent ten years becoming proficient in. At this point, the best I'm expecting of myself are freewrite-style musings that I hope will clarify as I go along. But step one is to get back into the writing habit.
Argh.
3 comments:
What's vernacular?
Sorry: that's "whatever the local language is (as opposed to something like Latin)." So when medievalists talk about something written "in the vernacular", it means English (or Anglo-Saxon) in England, French (or Occitan) in France, Spanish (or Catalan) in Spain, etc.
These documents are in a 14th-century variant of the local language. Orthographic rules are shaky, at best. Capitalization & punctuation at random. On the plus side, there are fewer abbreviations than in a Latin document.
Orthographic rules are shaky, at best. Capitalization & punctuation at random.
Sounds like teabagger signs!
http://moronswithsigns.blogspot.com/
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