Quote:
Originally Posted by sun surfer
I particularly love classics and one of the reasons is because I often feel immersed into that time period. Knowing there are changes by the authors themselves or by their original editors still keeps the text in that time period; knowing there are changes by modern day editors can make me feel like the text is a bit corrupted and I'm being condescended to.
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I don't personally think it is condescending: it's just a recognition of the fact that language changes. I suspect there are relatively few readers, for example, who would prefer to retain the "long s" that was the norm in 18th and early 19th-century spelling: "tenderneſs" rather than "tenderness", for example. Use that and the typical reaction will be "what's that funny 'f' in the middle of the word?"
Likewise, changing "shew" to "show" is simply a practical acknowledgement that the spelling of the word has changed.