[DCRM-L] Transcription question: why is our small "s" always an "s" but our small "i" is sometimes a "j"?

Mon Apr 12 12:53:06 MDT 2021

Bob, the international community is going the other way around. Read this<https://unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html#Lig2>, for existence, from UNICODE. No more ligatured characters will be made, and UNICODE is shying away from presentation styles of letters. (There's a more relevant statement from UNICODE out there I think, but this is what I find for now.) This is not exactly Erin's question, which concerns pre-modern long and short versions of letters, but there may be a principle to be applied.

I don't have an answer but I'll do my best to add to the conversation. 's' is treated different from 'i' because there is no modern letter that takes long 's' as its form. In this regard, DCRMB was right to treat ijuv as it does—convert to pre-modern or modern practice based on the practice of the printer—which isn't ideal but the least painful solution we could find. It occurs to me that we don't transcribe a pre-modern long 'j' as an eye because our conversion principle relies on case conversion.

I can't predict how attitudes will eventually change, whether in favor of continuing to transcribe a lower-case long eye as a j, or to tighten up meaning of the letter and shift to transcribing an i. Worth pointing out that the EMMO<https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Early_Modern_Manuscripts_Online_(EMMO)> (manuscript) transcription guidelines call for transcribing a j as an i, but retains the pre-modern letterform script of a majuscule F, which is transcribed as its written shape--a ligatured minuscule ff. (I believe they recognize the inconsistency of principle.) An inconsistency of principle is hard to avoid.

______________________________
Deborah J. Leslie, MA, MLS | Senior Cataloger | Folger Shakespeare Library | 201 East Capitol St., SE, Washington, DC 20003 | djleslie at folger.edu<mailto:djleslie at folger.edu> | www.folger.edu<http://www.folger.edu> | Her opinion her own

From: DCRM-L <dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu> On Behalf Of Robert Maxwell
Sent: Saturday, April 10, 2021 23:07
To: Erin Blake <EBlake at FOLGER.edu>; DCRM Users' Group <dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>
Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] Transcription question: why is our small "s" always an "s" but our small "i" is sometimes a "j"?

I don't know the answer to this except probably at the time the rules were formulated it was impossible to reproduce the long "s" in MARC (or on your average typewriter in pre-MARC days) and I'm not sure if even now it's possible in OCLC (though you imply it is). But I suspect if we changed the rules to require (or even optionally allow) transcription of long "s" we'd wind up with lots of people who don't know about the rules seeing these records and deciding in other records to transcribe long "s" as "f", so I'm not sure what I think about the idea of changing the transcription practice. Are there lots of (or even any) examples where long "s" vs. small "s" makes a difference to the identification of a particular state or issue?

For my cataloging assignments in Library School we were supposed to TYPE OUT catalog cards (if you can believe it, I am such a dinosaur 🙂) and one of the books did have long "s"es on the title page; I typed "f" but used whiteout to remove part of the bar to turn each into a long "s" (I did know the difference even at that youthful age) and the cataloging prof thought it was great (other class members who typed plain "f" lost points; of course those who typed "s" were given full credit) but I doubt if many catalogers typing out catalog cards for real had time to use whiteout in these situations ...

Bob

Robert L. Maxwell
Ancient Languages and Special Collections Cataloger
6728 Harold B. Lee Library
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
(801)422-5568

"We should set an example for all the world, rather than confine ourselves to the course which has been heretofore pursued"--Eliza R. Snow, 1842.

________________________________
From: DCRM-L <dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu<mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu>> on behalf of Erin Blake <erin.blake.folger at gmail.com<mailto:erin.blake.folger at gmail.com>>
Sent: Saturday, April 10, 2021 4:33 PM
To: DCRM Users' Group <dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu<mailto:dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>>
Subject: [DCRM-L] Transcription question: why is our small "s" always an "s" but our small "i" is sometimes a "j"?

Does anyone know why the DCRM transcription rules about early modern letterforms treat a lowercase "s" different from a lowercase "i"?

An early modern "s" at the front or in the middle of a word has a different shape than an "s" at the end of the word, but it's still an "s" and we transcribe it as an "s" (despite long-s being a unicode character).

An early modern "i" at the front or in the middle of a word has a different shape than an "i" at the end of the word, but we transcribe them differently, using the letter "j" for a terminal "i" (even though it's not a "j", it's a j-shaped "i").

It struck me particularly when looking at the date on one of Hogenberg's "Geschichtsblätter" (https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/3bm5h6<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/drfWCNkK3GiX9m5sm14hB?domain=luna.folger.edu>), which I've attached here. (It's the date of the event depicted in the engraving, not the imprint, so it's not as weird as it looks).

[cid:image001.png at 01D72FA5.003128D0]
Thanks,

Erin.

______________________
Erin Blake, Ph.D.  |  Senior Cataloger  |  Folger Shakespeare Library  |  201 E. Capitol St. SE, Washington, DC, 20003  |  eblake at folger.edu<mailto:eblake at folger.edu>  |  www.folger.edu<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/a-3SCPNK3GfMZEAu1gup7?domain=urldefense.com>   |  Pronouns: she/her/hers

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserver.lib.byu.edu/pipermail/dcrm-l/attachments/20210412/c56a3d9a/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.png
Type: image/png
Size: 693647 bytes
Desc: image001.png
URL: <http://listserver.lib.byu.edu/pipermail/dcrm-l/attachments/20210412/c56a3d9a/attachment-0001.png>