I understand that some things used to be written differently and maybe I’m ignorant of the conventions of a particular time period or location, but I fear that this lesson is riddled with oddly consistent mistakes. It looks like the uploader, Edit: Johnxbrown (My apologies, lingQuser), has been inactive for over a year.
Missing accents
Every -ir and -er verb in the imperfect (sufria, huia, conocia, etc)
Every instance of a word ending in -ción (distraccion, resolucion, etc)
Every instance of a verb in the conditional (apoderaria, preferia, etc)
Nouns ending in -ón (sazon, corazon, razon, etc)
These examples are all from one lesson. There are four lessons in the collection/course.
I looked through Don Quixote to see if it had the same spellings (since it was written long before the material in question) and it did not. It has resolución, hacía, venían, sería, razón, and experiencia.
Am I missing something? If not, these lessons need extensive editing.
The member who shared these lessons is johnxbrown, who apparently has not been active in a little over three years.
Although Librivox is given as the provider of the lesson, only the audio comes from Librivox. The text comes from Gutenberg. The orthography of the lesson comes from the Gutenberg text, which kept the orthography of the text it used. Gutenberg does not give the origin of the text it used.
My questions would be:
Does LingQ want to keep the original spelling, which is incorrect by current standards?
If not, should the editing be left to Johnxbrown?
If not, because the editing would be a bit extensive, should the editor be given credit for the lesson?
The original is from 1848, and the Gutenberg transcriber notes that the original spelling was kept. It’s no different from keeping the original older spellings in, say, Voltaire in French. For learning purposes, modern spellings would probably be nice. Whoever cares to do so could upload a new, separate version w/ modernized spellings and the same librivox recording, and note something like “(Modern Orthography)” in the title, so getting credit for all the work involved.
I may be interested in redoing it. It’d be much appreciated if some other people skimmed through the text and let me know if they catch anything else that is outdated.
Were I doing this, I would be content to run the Gutenberg text through a Spanish spell checker. Using LibreOffice, for example, I found more than a dozen “misspellings” in the first paragraph. One was an error you already spied, podian, for which the spell checker suggests the correct spelling.
I suppose Microsoft Word can clean it up as well.
You know more Spanish than I do, but if you want more help, just ask here or post a note on my wall.
The original Don Qujote didn’t have all the “proper modern accents”, just a few words had and looked more like î ô…, accents were added to el Quijote from XIX on.
This doesn’t mean that a text from 1848 shouldn’t have any accents, the thing is that in that period rules were quite loose, but words did have accents (even some accents that aren’t used today). It’s not like nowadays that we have la RAE. The author from Doña Juana wasn’t probably a big fan of accents that’s why he didn’t put them.
But I think the issue here is… would you like to study a lesson without accents?
That’s very interesting, Berta. Thanks for that info. No, I wouldn’t want to unless I was studying an original manuscript. I don’t think there is any need for lingq to have content with outdated spelling.
It took me a couple of hours (spell check and find and replace have limits), but I finally uploaded it with the updated orthography. The course is here: Login - LingQ
If anyone notices any mistakes I’ve made or that I failed to update, please tell me or anyone else with editing privileges.
If I get any points for this I’ll try to pass them along to the good folks at IDEL
Good job, kcb. Part 1 looks to be in tiptop shape. A couple of common nouns stand capitalized, but that makes for just the teeniest of distractions. I have an Edit pencil, but I left them capitalized. One was “Estamentos,” but I forget the other one.
