On 6/21/07 8:47 AM, "Stewart McCoy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Spelling was not standardised in the 16th century as much as it is today. If > there was more than one spelling then, we tend to standardise it now. For > example, William Byrd's name was spelt Bird as well as Byrd, but we always > stick to Byrd now. If we have only one spelling, as in the case of Jane > Pickeringe, we have no choice, and the name should stay as it was. After > all, that's how she chose to spell her own name. Just to add a little bit to what Stewart wrote - it¹s worth emphasizing that standardized spelling was a *long* time coming! Samuel Johnson¹s dictionary appeared in 1755 & Noah Webster¹s in 1806. But it still took another hundred years or so of school marms drumming the rules of ³proper² spelling into generations of school kids, along with all those spelling bees, to get where we are today - baffled by the plethora of variant spellings for our favorite luters¹ surnames! We may feel baffled, but for most people of the past ³correct² spelling was a non-issue. Even for literate people, even into the late 1800¹s. Variant spellings are even more common for surnames than for regular words. There are supposedly six known autograph signatures of Shakespeare. Each one is spelled differently. It¹s kind of tough for people today to get past that idea that there *must* be one ³correct² spelling for a surname. Trying to find that correct spelling for a surname of someone who lived several hundred years ago is a bit of a fool¹s errand. Perhaps the best we can do is identify the most common spelling used by the person in question (if possible) & use that, but always remember this is just a modern convenience for *our* use. Back to lurking & luting.... C.Etter To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
