18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 35

[cahn]

In the previous post Charles II found AITA:

Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?

Comments

Re: Colonel John O'Sullivan's memoirs

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, this is great! Somehow I had missed the fact that he wrote memoirs. ("Somehow" probably meaning that I had little to no access to primary sources back then, so I didn't bother keeping track.)

O'Sullivan and Lord George Murray had a mutual hate-on for each other,

Yes. Yes, they did. This I remember. :)

so reading this book one does not get a very good impression of Lord George.

Not surprising! What I remember from long-ago reading was that the biographers and historical fiction authors I remember took LGM's side--I walked away with a fairly negative impression of O'Sullivan. Have you encountered that skew in your more recent reading?

He always writes yt for that, which I've never seen before.

Yep, this is a thing! It goes back to Old English, which had a slightly different alphabet than modern English. One of the characters it had that we don't was the "thorn", spelled þ. Over time, the loop got pulled increasingly up and to the side, so it became more like a Y. Eventually, people forgot that there ever was a thorn and thought they were writing the letter y.

This is the origin of spellings like "Ye Olde Shoppe." Reading that, you would naturally pronounce "ye" like "ye of little faith," but the etymologically correct pronunciation is "the."

So what Sullivan is writing is historically "tht", which, like his "wch", was an abbreviation that was common in the 18th century. Lots of words, like "Mty" for "majesty" and so on, got abbreviated then in a way that's not common for those words now.

selenak: English spelling standardization began with the introduction of the printing press in the late 15th century. It continued gradually (and informally) until the early 19th century, at which point you can expect a text written by a good speller to overlap almost entirely with your sense of modern "correct" spelling. In the 18th century, spelling was fairly close to modern, but you will see more unfamiliar spellings like "wch" and "cloaths," which I wouldn't consider misspellings so much as correct for their time.

then later shoots a bird and makes him chicken soup from scratch. Awww.

Awww!

Well, I am hardly likely to start writing fic about them, but obviously I could not pass this slash fodder by without mentioning it.

And we thank you for it!

Re: Colonel John O'Sullivan's memoirs

[luzula]

Hands hurt; voice not working! /o\ Reply later.

Re: Colonel John O'Sullivan's memoirs

[cahn]

Huh! I knew about the thorn character, but not that it had become the Y in "Ye Olde Shoppe."

Re: Colonel John O'Sullivan's memoirs

[luzula]

What I remember from long-ago reading was that the biographers and historical fiction authors I remember took LGM's side--I walked away with a fairly negative impression of O'Sullivan. Have you encountered that skew in your more recent reading?

I've seen that around, definitely. Frank McLynn writes without justifying the statement that O'Sullivan was "untalented", for example. And there's definitely a vein of writing which sees LGM as a great genius and if the Prince had just done as he said, everything would have worked out (I plan to come back to that in a future comment!). I haven't read widely enough to say more generally whether the balance has shifted, but Duffy has a lot of respect for O'Sullivan's abilities, especially when it comes to logistics and organization. He has a mixed view of LGM, with both good and bad qualities. I know you think Duffy sometimes doesn't quote sources etc, but I have to say that Fight for a Throne is much better at that, and at justifying judgements, than many other books I've read. I guess it helps that Duffy is specifically a military historian, and many other authors aren't, which is why he goes deeper into the military aspects than other authors, who may just repeat some judgement on some person's military abilities without being able to justify it.

Ooh, thanks for explaining the "yt" thing!