Re: Rapator Translated (long!)

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

>   However, any typos in the text are that of von Huene's, not mine.

Wow!!! :-o

> Current German does not make so much profuse usage of the
> double-ess character as they did back then, and so forth.

At the moment that's individual variation -- around 1998 there's been a
great big spelling reform (by ivory-tower folks) that made ß usage a lot
more logical. Because it also introduced lots of nonsense (and looks ugly
when you aren't used to it), some people (and some important newspapers)
have chosen to ignore it. The official transition period will end in 2005...
but actually that's only relevant for bureaucracy and schools, as all other
things aren't controlled.
        Well, before 1901 German didn't have any fixed orthography that was
valid everywhere, it seems. :-)

> Not sure, but
> three different spellings "grosste, grosse, groesste" were quite frequent.

Well, the first is impossible (or maybe the photocopy is bad enough to have
lost the ö dots, in which case it's identical to the third?), the second is
"big", and the third is "biggest".

> In the title of the paper, I re-transcribed "development" to "evolution"
> for the modern perspective, though this may have been a wrong move,

Used pretty interchangeably in German. Every Wednesday I have a lecture
called "Development and Evolution", title in English, whole lecture in
German. Apparently the prof chose an English title not just because she's
used to it (all papers are in English, of course), but also to make sure
that "development" is embryology which it can but need not be in German.

> I have problems with "beschribenen," until
> this corrected to

beschri_e_benen. Absolutely no idea why he left out the "long i" (ie).