Or and Vert

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April Fools heraldic shenanigans

It is the custom of the SCA College of Arms to create and publish Letters of Misintent on April 1, rather than the more usual Letters of Intent, full of shenanigans of some type or another. Much of the time these are filled with pop culture references made documentable to SCA period by means primarily of the FamilySearch records and the fact that late 16th-century English surnames were often found used as given names as well, but there are occasionally other types of shenanigans, though those are generally funnier to heralds than to layfolk. This is the second year I've been the East Kingdom's submissions herald and therefore nominally in charge of deciding on a theme (or lack thereof) for the April 1 letter, creating it, and publishing it. Last year, everything was Very Too Much and I didn't get around to it; this year, I was determined not to let it pass me by, as I'm stepping down this summer and I wanted to have at least one with my name on it. Behold, the East'

Proposal for updates to SENA Appendix A: Czech, part 1

One of the best resources for consulting heralds is Appendix A of SENA , as that provides lists of name patterns that do not require further documentation, sorted by language group. If you're not particularly familiar with a given language (and even if you are!), it's a fantastic resource to help you construct historically-plausible names using a structure that's been previously documented to period, without needing to reinvent the wheel every time. Things like "late period English names can use double bynames" or "French descriptive/occupational bynames may use the article le, la, l', les or un/une or omit it." Not every language is represented, but it's a fantastic starting point and one that I point every new consulting herald towards. The Czech table, so far, has been empty, with merely the note "Czech: All patterns in Czech must be documented. Academy of Saint Gabriel report 3244 ( http://www.s-gabriel.org/3244.txt ) gives some leads fo

Czech names project update: data entry, part 1

Figured I might as well actually keep notes on what progress I'm making on this project! As a recap, I'm working on pulling the names out of various data sources for 14th-16th century Czechia, categorizing them by year and by gender, and looking for patterns both in the formation of the bynames and in the construction of the names as a whole. The first source I'm working with is Marta Štefková's Antroponyma v urbářích z 15.–17. století ( Proper Names in Urbars of the 15th–17th centuries, https://is.muni.cz/th/u1ye5/ ). This paper includes an index of names, with the full list of names from each year of her data (1483, 1581, and 1695); focusing on SCA period means I don't care about the names from 1695 and would prefer to exclude them from my own data. Since I want to do my own analysis of these names, and this sort of data works best in spreadsheets, I started by copying Štefková's list of names from 1483 and 1581 into my own spreadsheet. Each year in Štefko

On the SCA A&S community and motivational barriers

A friend of mine posted a thread today asking people about motivation in the A&S community, and how students tend to feel unmotivated when they can't reach their goal. The question posed was whether there are things in SCA A&S that people find to be motivational barriers, and if so, what is it that stops people from believing that they can do the thing — and what can we do to help. Never one to answer the question as posed, when instead I can answer the question I see as fundamentally underlying one's assumptions, I wrote a series of comments getting up on my soapbox about SCA A&S, and what the goals are, and where the barriers are, with the intention of getting other people to consider the overall framework they're working in. I saw the discussion up to that point as addressing symptoms, but not the root cause, and figured I might as well take a stab at getting to the root of it. Here's an edited version of where I went with that. tl;dr: We're not doin

Spelling conventions in late-period Czech, or, Making Google Translate less cranky

So I'm digging through some Latin/Czech dictionaries from 1579 and 1605, right, and I'm reminded yet again that like most other languages, Czech in period was (a) not fully consistent in its spelling, and (b) generally spelled somewhat differently than modern Czech, including using letters that are not present at all, or barely, in modern Czech. This can present difficulties in translation for those of us who aren't fluent, since Google Translate, bless its algorithmic heart, only knows modern Czech. I've spent enough time digging around in period Czech texts by this point that I make the relevant spelling substitutions fairly fluently, but I realized it might be useful to have them set down somewhere I could point others to, for use in their own research. I will note that while most of these are actually fairly consistent, others can be either situational (like y , as noted) or inconsistent across manuscripts or contexts (like v , as noted). For researchers who have s

Laurel's Challenge: Down the Rabbit Hole with 14th-16th century Czech orthography

[This post was written in answer to Mistress Lissa Underhill’s “Down the Rabbit Hole” challenge in the East Kingdom Laurels Challenge event ( https://moas.eastkingdom.org/list-of-laurels-challenges/ ).] In the process of researching 14th-16th century Czech names for my own name registration, I realized that I didn’t know how Czech orthography had changed over the centuries. For nearly all languages, of course, there are shifts over time, but this question is particularly of interest in languages that use diacritical marks. Particularly for name submissions to the SCA College of Arms, where we register the period spelling whenever possible, it’s important to know what period spellings look like, both for submitting the most period-appropriate form and for evaluating sources in the research process. With Czech names in particular, post-period secondary sources have a frustrating tendency to normalize the spelling of names, which seems primarily to be because Czech orthography in SCA peri