Or and Vert

[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...