Rosetta Project

There is this great site called The Rosetta Project. Similar to Project Gutenberg‘s text scans of vintage novels, The Rosetta Project scans vintage (expired copyright) childrens’ books as images. They even go through the trouble of translating them to other languages (though some are multi-lingual to begin with.) Although I don’t have kids and don’t plan on having kinds, I love looking through them for the illustrations.

In one of the first books I started browsing through, The Louis Wain Kitten Book, I (re-)discovered that people lived in different times. What what acceptable in the past may not fly these days. Unfortunately, this is a book without a date, so I don’t know exactly when “Jap” was an perfectly reasonable term for children, but it’s still interesting to know that at one point it was.

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Posted in: Books

One thought on “Rosetta Project”

  1. Yeah.

    I grew up watching old war movies…Iwo Jima, Midway, etc…So I never actually KNEW that I shouldn’t say Jap until I said it casually in front of my parents when we were talking about geography.

    Obviously, I didn’t mean it in a derogatory way. I just thought it was a kind of shorthand…like calling an American a “Yank.”

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