Or and Vert

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...

[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...