What it's like to be a medievalist (at least sometimes)

It's amazing how well three hours of transcribing Latin documents can scramble your brain. And "transcribe" is a misnomer here - I'm not working from manuscripts, but from a printed edition, so really, I'm working in the lap of luxury. The thing is, we don't own this edition, so I'm pulling out the pieces that I want to work with further and typing them up so I can have them on hand after I have to return the ILL'ed tomes (today's work ends up being 10 pages of single-spaced Latin). When I say it scrambles your brain, the problem for me is that my Latin is competent, but not brilliant (luckily, most of the stuff I work with has either been translated or wasn't in Latin to begin with). So while I can figure out pretty well what each word means, individually, or at least what function it plays in the sentence (subject, verb, object, conjunction, etc.), I can't just read the text like English. So really, I'm typing up what look like individual words and even syllables (which I first wrote as syllabi!) rather than sentences that make sense, and it's very easy to skip a line by mistake (because my brain doesn't easily catch that protribunali should be followed by sedentes, not assidencium). At least these documents are relatively formulaic, so I start to recognize what words are going to go together - for instance, qui in quarto consanguinitatis gradu ex utroque latere invicem sunt conjuncti. Unfortunately, the frequent use of formulae, combined with the fact that Latin expresses a word's grammatical function through word-endings, means that the damn formulae keep re-occurring in slightly different cases, so you have to pay attention to the endings all the time.

I guess copying word-for-word is always slow, slower than when I can spew out stream-of-consciousness (like right now!), but typing Latin feels even slower. The biggest problem, I think, is that your fingers really do get used to typing in the patterns of a particular language. For instance, my fingers are very unhappy about typing double Is - "ii" - even though my brain knows perfectly well that this is a very common appearance in Latin. Now that I've been doing this for three hours, however, I've started to Latinize my fingers, with the result that I can't type an English word correctly to save my life.

What's interesting about this kind of relatively mindless transcription is that you kind of subconsciously start to notice interesting patterns in the material, even though this is just a data-gathering stage, not a read-and-analyze stage. I always approach a new set of documents with the fear that I won't actually find anything of interest in them, and thankfully, that hasn't usually been the case. This is something that has really improved the longer I've been teaching, strangely enough.

Okay, I think it's time to put away the Latin and get back to English before I'm permanently confused.

Comments

[Ancarett]

New Kid? Just think of the havoc sixteenth century English wreaks on my modern syntax! I've had a colleague ask why I don't just modernise the spelling as I go along -- yes, that would be easier, but a hecka inaccurate, so we soldier on with the painful transcriptions. Wishing you luck on yours!

[Q]

The other fun thing is when you've been reading the Latin aloud in your head for a long time, then try to speak English and realize that you're still using Latinate vowel sounds . . .

[Jeannette]

Or the scribe you're reading is so illiterate that there's macrons thrown around rendering the text indecipherable. I've never been so thrown off by the scribe before as the text I'm working on now. It's like he didn't know what the word was so he threw a macron over it; doesn't help me.

Have fun!!

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Can you not just copy the pages?

[turtlebella]

ouch. My brain hurts just thinking about that. I got really used to the Portuguese keyboard and when I got home it was really hard to type on an American one...which is the only way I can relate to your experience...

[New Kid on the Hallway]

ADM, yeah, I probably could, and I may well do that with the rest of the volumes since they need to go back. I just like having them on the computer - and when I first got the books, I wasn't sure how much material there was, and whether it was worth copying it or not. (It's also habit from being in the archives!)

[Rebecca]

It sounds to me like you deserve a nice chilled glass of white wine after all of that. Or a shot of tequila. Something. I think I got a cramp in my brain just imagining what you were doing. Wow.

[Terminal Degree]

Wow. That's so cool.

While you're transcribing Latin tomorrow, I'll be teaching my students to read and sing medieval chant. I'm not very good at it, but once I've been reading it for a while, my brain has to work harder when I go back to modern notation.

I just wish I could pronounce the Latin. (Luckily my students won't know the difference...)

[Dr. Virago]

Coming late to this...but now you know exactly how it was that medieval scribes sometimes committed "eye skip" errors (even in vernacular texts). That's kind of cool!...In fact, hmmm, I may one day make my students transcribe a text in Latin (but by hand!) just to give them a concrete feel for what being a scribe was like!

[Dee]

Another late comment--if there is anything really consistent yet annoying to type, you can set up MS Word to AutoCorrect it for you, including phrases. This made my archive transcribing quite a bit faster. (Dr. Virago, what a great class idea--too bad the fire marshals wouldn't allow candlelight :)

[Evan]

If you're pressed for time, can't you photograph or photocopy the ILL pages you need, and transcribe later?

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Okay, so why am I so pathetic that I needed to have Evan and ADM suggest photocopying to me??? Maybe because I associate primary sources like this with archival sources?? In any case, I have in fact submitted four out of the six volumes to the work-study people to copy the relevant bits... MUCH easier! (I will slink away feeling thick now...)

Dee, I LOVE autocorrect for that - I had all sorts of abbreviations set up at one point when I was doing a LOT of transcribing in the archives. Definitely saves a lot of time (and strain on one's hands!).

[Peri]

Yikes. I get fuzzy brain syndrome after doing the same thing with ancient Greek. Blech. It's a delight to actually piece a paragraph or 2 together to read, but hell to try to copy a large portion of text for re-reading. I'm quite sympathetic!

[Michele]

Hi! I' m writing because a friend of mine ( who doesn't speak english)
asked me if I can find a software to transcribe latin e.g. Dragon naturally speaking (You speak with a microphone and the computer writes)
He mainly works from manuscripts so it's impossible scan a text and than convert it with an OCR sofware . Furthermore the
the dictation software he uses doesn't recognize any latin word because
it hasn't a latin library or dictionary.
By the way it is fun to see that even if my friend is an italian speaker (a languange very close to the latin) he always complains about the same problems you describe in this forum.
Ciao Michele