On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 10:57 PM, Eugene McDonnell <[email protected]> wrote: > Further than that, if you go back from Chaucer to Anglo-Saxon English, > I can guarantee that you won't be able to read any of it. The shapes > of the letters are different, there are even new letters. If you can > get hold of Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader -- mine is so old, it has no > ISBN. My "At Play With J", of course, has one. Since I got my book > from Schoenhof's Foreign Books, Inc. at 1280 Massachusetts Avenue, > 38, Massachusetts, I suspect I got mine while I was at Harvard and > that it would be difficult to find.
If it was just for n)w l)tt)rs and diff)r)nt l)tt)r shap)s, that wouldn't mak) r)ading impossibl). Some advertisements do use that technique, replacing some letters with completely unrecognizable forms trusting that people would still be able to recognize the whole word or text. Ambrus ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
