Talk:Plain Tales from the Hills/The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows

Updating text: spelling and punctuation

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gate_of_the_Hundred_Sorrows

The word 'bazar' occurs twenty times in this story. BAZAR is the spelling used in the Penguin Popular Classics edition of Plain Tales From The Hills, which copies the first published text. An older spelling puts a bar over the second vowel to show that it is long, and modern spelling is usually BAZAAR. The word is Persian and has two long vowels; though only the second vowel is pronounced long. Kipling would have pronounced it with stress on the second syllable.

Kipling was fond of the double hyphen which has become a dash in more recent punctuation.

Should spelling and punctuation be updated to reflect modern custom and practice?

--SteveBKK 05:53, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

(my response here is just my opinion, and my understanding of common practice - I may be wrong!)

Hi, we aim to faithfully reproduce an edition; usually it is the only edition that the contributor has available to them, or one that they prefer. "Modernisation" is not encouraged; if anything, we try to go back to the most original edition in order to encourage readers to understand the language of the time. We also add footnotes in the text to explain nuisances that they reader may not readily guess. Comments on talk pages are also a useful way of telling the readers more about the text.

All of the texts in Plain Tales from the Hills were uploaded by Phaedriel (talk • contribs), who has recorded on "Talk:Plain Tales from the Hills" that the source used was the gutenberg edition, and these pages do look gutenberg-ish. (take notice of the capitalised words; in the original they were probably in italic) Gutenberg is an excellent project, but many of their texts use ASCII in place of the original glyphs (which require a more complex character encoding like UNICODE). So 'é' is transcribed as 'e' or 'ee'.

With regards to bazar, I suggest you start by taking a look at wikt:bazar and wikt:bazaar. Your knowledge of the etymology could be used to expand those pages, and create extra pages for the word as it was written/pronounced in earlier times. If I understand you correctly, wikt:bazār is another way this word was written. John Vandenberg 09:18, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Further Comments

I appreciate that your aim is to reproduce an original edition as accurately as possible, but you are limited by availability of texts and willingness of helpers. Can you, however, simply lift text straight from Project Gutenberg? Kipling's stories appeared in magazines before they were collected in 1888. The author made minor revisions for the Macmillan (London) 1899 edition of Plain Tales from the Hills, which may be regarded as standard if not original.

The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows was Kipling's first commercially published story. He wrote it at the age of 18 when he worked in Lahore. There is a glint in the story of why he would be the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. There is also much in the story that modern readers find hard to take - the 19th century racial views that caused his works to fall out of favour and fashion in the latter 20th century.

The prose remains powerful, but it is hard to understand the story without notes. If it is of interest, I have notes on the story.

--SteveBKK 04:04, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, please do add notes. At the top of each page is a notes field. Currently it merely says:

notes    = From Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)

Try to keep it to a succinct paragraph about the work, but nobody will complain if you write a few paragraphs if it is an interesting read.

Also, if you can put your hands on any documentary sources, such as reviews, that are now in the public domain, that will help our readers understand the opinions of the time. For example, The New York Times has two sources that may be interesting, and I am sure The Times will have similar among their archives. We have a number of articles from The New York Times and The Times.

If you feel like you need more room, start a new Wikipedia article, w:The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows, and/or expand w:Plain Tales from the Hills. John Vandenberg 11:02, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Notes on the text

The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows was Kipling's first story, so detailed notes on that one story will cover much of Plain Tales from the Hills. I will have to search for 19th century reviews from The London Times and The Times of India.

May I point out that the following notice is wrong:

"This work is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago."

No, he didn't - but he died more than 70 years ago which is enough for copyright to have lapsed. This might be checked with Kipling's estate and The Society of Authors.

--SteveBKK 15:11, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Steve, where did you see that notice of him being dead at least 100 years? John Vandenberg 21:05, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

John, the notice is at the bottom of the main page for Plain Tales from the Hills. I am not sure where to put the notes that I promised and have copied them into my user page for viewing/reviewing

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/User:SteveBKK --Steve 14:49, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Notes in place at end of story

Thanks. I see how to write links in the script. Some of the points were already covered in the dictionary and in the encyclopedia. One link is missing - To be Filed for Reference - which is in Plain Tales from the Hills. --Steve 01:26, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

I've fixed the "died at least 100 years ago" problem you pointed out.

Should "To be Filed for Reference" be "To be Held for Reference" ? John Vandenberg 04:53, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

John "To be Filed for Reference" is the title in the 1994 Penguin Popular Classics edition of Plain Tales from the Hills, ISBN 0-14-062092-3, which is based on the 1888 text.

--Steve 00:47, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

The page has been moved. John Vandenberg 02:45, 9 December 2007 (UTC)