🚀 go-pugleaf

Regarding the question from McGill on scanning (We prefer to ICR, intelligent
character recognize) 19th century Italian, and how to treat an apparent
apostrophe, I checked with Wang's Global Adaptation Center which is in
charge of internationalization of our products.---Wang is a major factor
in the Italian market for computer systems, although still not as big
there as Olivetti(!), so we do quite a lot with the Italian language.

Our Italian GAC says the answer to this question is very simple:  19th-century
Italian spelling did not differ appreciably from contemporary Italian spelling
and did not include any special characters other than those used in present-day
Italian.  The tiny character referred to by Robert Macfarlane has a well-known
name:  apostrophe.  If the OCR does not reproduce it as such and is trainable,
then it should be trained to recognize this character for what it is: a simple
old-fashioned apostrophe.  (This reply was the result of a quick consultation
with Denisa Govoni, the senior Italian translator here at the Global Adaptation
Center.  My personal background includes, among other things, teaching Romance
Linguistics and History of the Italian Language at Harvard.)

We'll be happy to provide any further advice or recommendations on this that
might be needed.

Pasquale.G.Tato@OFFICE.Wang.com

from Michael.Willett@OFFICE.Wang.com