Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexBell
In one of grannyGrump's excellent ebooks Mark Twain (to the best of my memory) described how he and his mule train walked up a canon. This was in the original text. I hope you would agree that it was perfectly appropriate to change Mark Twain's word to canyon, which was what he obviously meant. There was no possibility whatever of making any sense of canon in the original text, and I think it does Mark Twain no honour to leave the word unchanged.
|
Actually, Alex, there's a much simpler explanation. The word "canyon" comes from the Spanish word "caņon", and in 19th century books - especially American books - it's far more common to see the original Spanish spelling than the English variant. It seems pretty clear that what happened in the case of the book that you're referring to is that the tilde accent had been lost (most early PG books didn't have any accents at all). Personally I would have restored the accent, not changed the spelling.
This is an example of why it's important to have done extensive reading within the canon of literature (pun intended
) which one is proof-reading, to allow one to recognise this kind of thing when one comes across it.
Of course editors can - and do - make this type of editorial decision, but my personal preference is to see the original spelling and punctuation.