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Old 06-20-2007, 02:24 PM   #16
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I don't like that solution, personally -- I'd prefer to read what the author meant to write if at all possible.
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Old 06-21-2007, 02:50 AM   #17
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I know that they aren't perfect, but generally speaking the proofreading of PG texts is pretty good. I would tend to leave well alone except in cases which are obviously typos or scanning errors.

If you read a lot of 18th and 19th century stuff, as I do, you quickly realise that the English language is constantly changing, and that you really can't say that things are "correct" or "incorrect". They may be different to what we use, but they were usages which were in vogue at the time.

We actually do some pretty stupid things ourselves if you stop and think about it. Eg, we're happy to say:

I'm late, aren't I?

but if we expand the abbreviation and say:

I'm late, are not I?

then it's "wrong"

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Old 06-21-2007, 08:23 AM   #18
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The proofreading of Gutenberg texts is atrocious if not nonexistent.

There are books with typos in the title (The Case of General Opel). There are books where the first letter of the first word of Chapter 1 is a typo (Fraternity). Classics of literature have been turned into fart jokes ("In my extreme distress of wind, I have a morbid
fear..." -- Dr Jekyll). Books that seem to be sneering parodies of their authors work ("North we raced from the Bonin Islands to pick up the seal-herd, and north we hunted it for a hundred days into frosty, mitten weather" - John Barleycorn). There are books with over one thousand typos, exclusive of punctuation (Mr Scarborough's Family). Works with fewer errors, but more spoiled by them; for instance, to take the same author, Framley Parsonage; because of the typist's inattention, it's narrated not by a worldly, detached observer, but by something of a doofus. Typos have redrawn the map of the world (there is a border, in The Mad King, between Austria and Siberia, not Serbia). There are many books with a page or two missing (eg. Barry Lyndon) and some with every fifth chapter missing (Dolly Dialogues).

Execrable as this system is, it's preferable to any plan to "simply" recut literature to our modern tastes, as of the current o'clock. One wonders what The Merry Wives of Windsor, or The English Rogue by Richard Head, would look like after such emendations.
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Old 06-21-2007, 08:31 AM   #19
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The proofreading of Gutenberg texts is atrocious if not nonexistent.
That's a little unfair.

Books done by PG in the last couple of years, virtually all of which have come through the Distributed Proofreaders project, are generally pretty well proofread. It tends to be the older works, many of which were manually typed, that are poor. Unfortunately it was the best-known books which got added to PG first, and hence these are the ones which are of the poorest quality.

For example, I've just finished reading four "Dr. Thorndyke" books by R. Austin Freeman. Three of them were virtually flawless; the fourth was full of errors.
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Old 06-21-2007, 08:41 AM   #20
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Harry, I certainly don't want to denigrate the valuable work of Gutenberg. But proofreading is not their strong suit. Mr Scarborough's Family has a gold rating by Distributed Proofreaders. They will not permit any of the more than 1000 errors in Gutenberg's version to be corrected, apparently because three people glanced at it and said, "duh...I guess!"
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Old 06-21-2007, 08:45 AM   #21
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I'm surprised to hear that they would object to errors being corrected! PG are generally only too happy to be informed of errors. I've reported many myself over the years and they've always been put right. If you look at the weekly PG catalogs, a significant proportion are corrected versions of older works.

I wonder why they wouldn't want to put right something that has, you say, over 1000 errors? That seems very strange!
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Old 06-21-2007, 10:08 AM   #22
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Originally Posted by HarryT View Post
I know that they aren't perfect, but generally speaking the proofreading of PG texts is pretty good. I would tend to leave well alone except in cases which are obviously typos or scanning errors.

If you read a lot of 18th and 19th century stuff, as I do, you quickly realise that the English language is constantly changing, and that you really can't say that things are "correct" or "incorrect". They may be different to what we use, but they were usages which were in vogue at the time.

We actually do some pretty stupid things ourselves if you stop and think about it. Eg, we're happy to say:

I'm late, aren't I?

but if we expand the abbreviation and say:

I'm late, are not I?

then it's "wrong"

Actually, the way I'd say it would be... "Am I late?"
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Old 06-21-2007, 10:10 AM   #23
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Originally Posted by HarryT View Post
That's a little unfair.

Books done by PG in the last couple of years, virtually all of which have come through the Distributed Proofreaders project, are generally pretty well proofread. It tends to be the older works, many of which were manually typed, that are poor. Unfortunately it was the best-known books which got added to PG first, and hence these are the ones which are of the poorest quality.

For example, I've just finished reading four "Dr. Thorndyke" books by R. Austin Freeman. Three of them were virtually flawless; the fourth was full of errors.
Have you fixed the errors and reposted a "better" copy?
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Old 06-21-2007, 10:14 AM   #24
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Have you fixed the errors and reposted a "better" copy?
Of course!

See: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10943

My standard practice, when I'm reading, is to "bookmark" any page on which I notice a typo. Then when I've finished the book, I go back to the source and correct the errors.
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Old 06-21-2007, 10:43 AM   #25
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Typo corrections are fine if you know it to be a typo.

As an example, to put the works of Damon Runyon into standard English would kill the entire work. Likewise I refrain from correcting the constant misspelling of color by those from the UK, they always seem to put a "u" in it for some reason. There is also the UK practice of dropping the article "the" far more than in the US. These are not errors, they are style variations and should be preserved.
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Old 06-21-2007, 11:32 AM   #26
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Likewise I refrain from correcting the constant misspelling of color by those from the UK, they always seem to put a "u" in it for some reason.
I think you have that a little "backwards". It's not us who add the "u", but you who drop it; one of the results of Mr Webster's somewhat futile attempt to "rationalise" the spelling of English .

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There is also the UK practice of dropping the article "the" far more than in the US.
Only in a few very specific instances; eg we "go to hospital" rather than "go to the hospital" and similarly with "church", but not with most other nouns.

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These are not errors, they are style variations and should be preserved.
British English and American English really are different languages; one certainly shouldn't try to convert one into the other - they both have their own unique features which make them what they are.
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Old 06-21-2007, 12:25 PM   #27
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As an example, to put the works of Damon Runyon into standard English would kill the entire work.
This is most certainly the case, as Mr. Runyon was a character who truly knew what time it was when it came to capturing the language-type patterns of the people about whom he typically wrote.

Too bad his work is not PD yet.

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Only in a few very specific instances; eg we "go to hospital" rather than "go to the hospital" and similarly with "church", but not with most other nouns.
Oh, we "go to church" over here too, "the church" would refer to the building itself, the collective group of congregants as a body, or the organization, in the cases of an organized church, such as the Catholic or Episcopalian Churches -- probably because we never really had just one church over here.

What I don't get is those odd folks out West who insist on "the-ing" perfectly good freeways: "the 101," "the 280," instead of just "101" and "280."
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Old 06-21-2007, 12:29 PM   #28
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You have to remember, Southern English (form the south in the USA) is a another form of language. Not sure if it would even be classed as a form of English.
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Old 06-21-2007, 12:31 PM   #29
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This is most certainly the case, as Mr. Runyon was a character who truly knew what time it was when it came to capturing the language-type patterns of the people about whom he typically wrote.
Another wonderful example of an author who perfectly captures dialect speech is Mark Twain, of course. I read recently that in "Tom Sawyer" no fewer than seven different dialects (most of which no longer exist today) are faithfully represented. If you tried to re-write Tom Sawyer in "standard English" (whatever that is) you'd just destroy the book.
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Old 06-21-2007, 12:36 PM   #30
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You have to remember, Southern English (form the south in the USA) is a another form of language. Not sure if it would even be classed as a form of English.
You're not kidding there.

This is a true story: a few years ago I went on a coach touring holiday of Italy, with a company who takes passengers from all over the English-speaking world - the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, etc. There was an elderly couple on the coach from Louisville, Kentucky who literally could not understand a word that I said (I have a Yorkshire accent - Northern England). Another guy, from New York, had to act as an "interpreter" for them (the New York guy could understand me without any problems).
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