Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexBell
I recently uploaded The Queen of Hearts (a collection of novels written in the 1850s) by Wilkie Collins to the MR library. As well as changing 'gayety' to 'gaiety' and 'gayly' to 'gaily' I also changed 'gay' to 'light-hearted'. I did this because the English language has changed in the last 150 odd years. In our day 'a gay man' would almost certainly be read as 'a homosexual man,' and this is simply not what Collins meant - he would have used a different term if he had dared to mention a character's sexual orientation at all. I did add a note to the posting that I had updated spelling and hyphenation - I also changed 'to-day' to 'today' for example.
How does that grab you?
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I think modernising spelling and selected vocabulary like you describe is fine. Sure, I can understand the old-fashioned spelling, but your changes make it easier to read. (I read some of Austen's unpublished works some time ago -- she consistently spelled "friend" as "freind". I was taken out of the story all the time, and it made me associate the narrator with constable Carrot in Ank-Morpork.)
You mentioned the changes in a preface to the book itself, that's also good. It would have been even better if you had gone a bit more into detail on changes in vocabulary, so that's my wish for your future contributions. It's interesting to see examples of how vocabulary changes. ("Making love" is something very different in 1930s Popeye than it is today.) (By the way, thanks for the preface! I really appreciate you taking the time to write a bit about who the author was.)
I read fiction for entertainment, and removing small linguistic stumbling stones helps that purpose. It'll also make old books more accessible to more people - people who read less easily, have less patience, and/or don't have English as their first lanugage. If I want to read Wilkie Collins to study the language of his time, I'd better check original editions anyway.
...and now I'm off to read "Queen of Hearts. Have you read
Sarah Rees Brennan's parody of "The Woman in White"? Hilarious, and it made me discover Collins.