Thursday, January 16, 2014

Divergence - Progress Update 16 January 2013

Greetings,

As anyone following this blog will know, version one of the fencing manual was completed a little while ago. Now it is time for further changes to be made to both the modern and Elizabethan versions of this project. For the most part the biggest change between the modern and Elizabethan versions made in version one was a conversion of spellings and also of punctuation. No grammar was really altered and really only the major punctuation was affected. Moving forward will result in divergence between the modern and Elizabethan manuals.

In the case of the modern version, this will be a process of change toward a more usable format. This means the addition of headings and subheadings for starters in the manual in order that there are not great blocks of text for the reader to deal with. In such technical manuals such as this one smaller blocks of information are much more readily usable for the reader. Further on in this version there will also be an addressing of some of the expression and other more grammatical elements, once again to make it more accessible to the reader.

In the case of the Elizabethan version, the processes involved in change will be, for the most part, focusing on grammatical elements and sentence structures. The punctuation is only one element in the reading of the manual, grammar also has a large part to play in order for this manual to be "Elizabethanized". No doubt there will also be further spelling and punctuation changes in the process of change.

What is going to result is quite a striking divergence between the modern and Elizabethan versions of the manual. While the core elements and teachings of both will remain the same, thus the content remains the same, the format and language elements will change quite markedly. There is no doubt that version one will be the real time where the two versions of this manual will seem the most similar and that big changes will be happening in the process of furthering this project.

Cheers,

Henry.