contents

Inventories of the Orphan Chamber
of the Cape of Good Hope


Transcription and editing rules

The editors decided to have the texts transcribed as closely as possible to the original documents, and to allow alterations only if it would result in a smoother and more reader-friendly presentation of the text.

Editing was therefore done according to Afrikaans spelling rules that could be applied to the old Dutch documents with good effect. This was a logical decision because most of these old spelling applications were in any case retained in Afrikaans (e.g. using the initial capital letter for the names of months and days). English spelling rules were applied to inventories written in English.

  • In accordance with the spelling rules the unnecessary use of capital letters and punctuation marks, especially commas and dashes, was reduced to what is actually needed to make for smooth reading.
  • The spelling was only corrected in cases where the reading process was complicated by the writing of parts of compounds or derivations as individual elements, especially prefixes and suffixes not connected to the word stem, or the linking of words or elements that do not belong together. For example, en de changed to ende where it means ‘and’, but was retained when it refers to the word group ‘and’ plus the article of the following noun.
  • Instead of using ditto (ad idem, idem, dezelve, etc.), the word itself was repeated. In cases of a grammatical inconsistency the word(s) concerned had to be put in square brackets, for example: one book, three ditto became one book, three [book]. Changing book to books in this case would interfere with the specific usage of ditto. The [ ..... ] brackets were also used to represent gaps caused, inter alia, by damage to the original text.
  • Abbreviations were left unchanged, because the normalisation of words and the writing in full of abbreviations would have resulted in a personal interpretation of the text.

Apart from the few rules that were applied, the rest of the text was transcribed without correcting spelling errors, or omitting or adding words or letters, for example stinhout (instead of stinkhout), Plettenbbaaij (instead of Plettenbergbaaij) and buikblanken (instead of buikplanken). The substitution of the p with a b as seen in the latter example often occured in the language of some individuals, presumably coming from German-speaking regions.

The same principle regarding incorrect spelling applied to the English texts, for example morning clothes (instead of mourning clothes), nine p: of stockens (instead of nine pairs of stockings), 3 bottels, wite copper, silver purs, crocerij ware and two cubs (instead two cups).

Due to the application of the above editorial approach the researcher has a quite neutral copy of the original text.

 

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