19th-century spelling in modern texts

[Avram Lyon]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 7:53 PM, Margaret Samu <margaret.samu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a standard for transcribing 19th-century spelling (in LC
> transliteration)? Do you modernize it, or leave is as it is? I need to know
> what the standard is for the endnotes of essays that cite 19th-century texts
> and titles.
>
> For example, do you keep the plural adjective -yia in "Khudozhestvennyia
> pis'ma," and the masculine genitive adjectives "khudozhestvennago"
> and "literaturnago"--or do you use current standard spellings? What about
> hard signs?
>
> My instinct is to modernize the spelling (charming as it is!), especially
> because all the hard signs at the end of words would be impossible to
> distinguish from quotation marks, and the various letters for i and e are
> indistinguishable from one another due to lack of Latin equivalents.

The official LC transliteration tables
(http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html) provide distinct treatment
for i-desiaterichnoe (ī -- with a bar on it) and for yat (ie -- joined
by a ligature), but since these adornments are frequently ignored in
the LC romanization as understood by scholars, you can probably fold
them in with "I" and "IE" in your text. But you will find them in most
library catalogs in the US and UK. Fortunately, the romanization
simply drops word-final hard signs, so you won't be littering your
text with quotation marks in any case.

For bibliographic references, which are largely intended to help the
reader locate your sources, I think you should be faithful to the -yia
and -ago spellings-- these spellings are faithfully reproduced in
library catalogs in the US, and there's no reason to hamper searches
by forcing your reader to remember to restore the original spelling.
Russian card catalogs, on the other hand, seem to prefer modernizing
orthography. Still, it's easier for your reader to modernize on the
fly than to archaize on the fly, and the search question is less
pressing for the physical card catalogs that dominate for works of
this period in Russia.

How you handle orthographic reform in the main text is another
question altogether; I'm personally on the side of preserving the
original orthography in academic contexts, but that's another question
for another day.

Respectfully,

Avram Lyon
UCLA

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