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Showing posts from September, 2021

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...