
	The orthography of machine-readable Neolatin texts: A plaidoyer for minimal intervention

Neolatin orthography is neither arbitrary nor uniform (III)

'Reforming' Neolatin orthography will cut it off from the Romance languages.

praesumptuosus is an established spelling AFTER antiquity and leads (through intermediate stages) to Engl. presumptuous. The correct classical spelling is praesumptiosus.

Some words do not have what even remotely resembles a standard spelling. sonetum/sonettus/sonetium: Clearly the spelling reflects assumptions about the etymology, the relationship to the volgare and about how the volgare evolved from earlier Latin.

cygnus (swan) is akin to Ital. cigno and Fr. cigne. Neolatin texts have both cygnus and cycnus. Introducing the uniform spelling cycnus (proposed e.g. by CAMENA's reglat-tool) destroys this connection. In this case the spelling in antiquity is mostly a matter of conjecture based on etymology (and is hardly ever transmitted in classical texts).

If we 'normalize' Latin translations from modern languages, we may inadvertently destroy evidence for the influence of the original (ex.: Pierre d' Avity - Johann Ludwig Gottfried, Archontologia cosmica; Bodin, De republica).