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| The orthography of machine-readable Neolatin texts: A plaidoyer for minimal intervention | |
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Some Neolatin features will successfully resist 'modernization'
Should we reform poenitet to paenitet, but leave the papal poenitentiarius, an office which antiquity did not know?
What about the famous dat./abl. plur. hiis? Connect it with hic, haec, hoc, or is, ea, id?
Even proper names known from antiquity can have divergent spellings, that may reveal not only an author's linguistic competence, but also the sources he used.
Girolamo Vida, De dignitate rei publicae, 1,37,2 writes Hiphicrates for a name, which in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, is spelt Iph-. Clearly this cannot be an intervention of the typesetter. Should we improve Vida? The same name is earlier spelt Hyphicrates in Gauricus, De sculptura, p.257.
If we interfer with Virgilius/Vergilius, we eradicate a discussion which has occupied a good many humanists.
See also Cygnea below.