Appendix.—Notes to etext

Appendix.—Notes to etext.

Words:

The names Loanda and Zambesi are given in most modern texts as Luanda and Zambezi.

In three cases, the spelling used in the original was distracting enough that it has been changed: musquito > mosquito, hachshish > hashish, and nomade > nomad.

In three other cases, two variant spellings of a word were used in the text. These were made uniform in accordance with the modern standard. They were: water-buck > waterbuck, Mosambique > Mozambique, and imbody > embody.

Other notes on terms: Livingstone often refers to ground-nuts—this is the British term for a peanut. Mutokwane ('Cannabis sativa') must be some variety of marijuana.

Symbols:

As the symbols for the British Pound (a crossed L), Degrees (small circle, in the upper half of the line of text), and fractions cannot be represented in ASCII, the following standards have been used:

Pounds: written out, and capitalized, AFTER the number of pounds, rather than before it. Hence "L20" becomes 20 Pounds. (where L represents the Pound symbol.)

Degrees, Minutes, Seconds: "Degrees", when used alone, is either spelled out or abbreviated "Deg."—but is always capitalized where it replaces the symbol. When a location is given with a combination of degrees and minutes, or degrees, minutes, and seconds, [d] is used to denote the symbol for degrees, ['] represents minutes, and ["] represents seconds—these latter two are the common symbols, or at least as similar as ASCII can represent. For an example, lat. 9d 37' 30" S. would be latitude 9 degrees 37 minutes 30 seconds south. All temperatures given are in Fahrenheit.

Fractions: Where whole numbers and fractions are combined, the whole number is separated from the fraction with a dash. For example, in Chapter 21: 16 ounces and 2-19/20 drams would translate as 16 ounces and two-and-nineteen-twentieths drams. Incidentally, Livingstone uses British measurements, which sometimes differ from the American.

Corrected Errors:

Errors in the original text were corrected when the context presented compelling evidence that there was in fact an error. When possible, proper names were checked against the index for extra surety.

Accented Characters in Words:

To maintain an easily searchable text, accented or special characters have been discarded. The following is a pretty complete list of the words in the text which were originally accented. They appear more or less in the order in which they first appeared with the accent—often the accents were dropped in the original. In each case, the accent follows the appropriate letter, the "ae" and "oe" combinations are represented as (ae) and (oe), [\], [/], [~], [^] and [-] represent the accent that looks like them which would appear above the preceding letter. [=] represents an accent that looks like the bottom half of a circle, also appearing above the letter, ["] is an umlaut, and [,] represents a cedilla.