Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 20

[cahn]

Yuletide signups so far:
3 requests for Frederician RPF, 2 offers
2 requests for Circle of Voltaire RPF, 3 offers !! :D :D

(I am so curious as to who the third person is!)

Comments

Re: New and Upcoming Sources Pt. 1

[prinzsorgenfrei]

One of us would have to be up to decyphering Fritz' handwriting and his French, and it almost definitely won't be me.

I could possibly attempt to prove myself useful!
I mean, I'd probably be useless concerning the French part, but attempting to decipher old handwriting is something I'm quite interested in! I've only studied old roman, early medieval and 19th century writings so far (some of them for uni, some of them not), but I'd actually love to get better at reading 18th century stuff too!

Re: New and Upcoming Sources Pt. 1

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, that's AWESOME! I bet, with all our teamwork, we could piece this letter together!

Re: New and Upcoming Sources Pt. 1

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, you know, since the letters in Trier are both in German, maybe this letter will be in German too, and then we'll have it made!

Btw, if you want to start practicing on Fritz, Wilhelmine, and some other siblings, this site has both facsimiles and transcriptions for you.

Cunning plan:
1) You work on getting the hang of the handwriting.
2) We wait for lockdown to end and order the letter.
3) Profit!

I've only studied old roman, early medieval and 19th century writings

"Only." This is impressive!

Re: New and Upcoming Sources Pt. 1

[prinzsorgenfrei]

I just checked some of them out and honestly, the handwriting is rather neat compared to other stuff I've had to decipher :D As long as there's not too much bleeding from the ink on the letter in question (like on the Dresden one, that one would have been quite tiresome to work through), I could probably manage to transcribe it. Unless Fritz only used his neater handwriting for Wilhelmine, but facsimiles of other stuff I've seen look similar enough.

This is impressive!
Thank you ^^' I've only transcribed a few of the older types of writing in a class I took in my first semester at uni (back in the good old days of actually BEING at uni) and learned a little bit about them, so I'm no expert by any means. Though I did really enjoy this class (and auxiliary sciences as a whole), so I'm glad it might be of use :D

Late 19th/early 20th century German cursive is something I'm a little better at (taught myself how to write in it some years ago for this exact purpose with the added bonus of being able to write whatever I want in class without people being able to read it), and I feel like that's helping me quite a bit with this :D