E-mail writers and texters are always looking for ways to have fun with (not to mention make more interesting) their often-humdrum e-mails and texts. But they only have one writing style—their own. Until now. Now they can write in the style of the great writers of the past.
Fiction writers trying to recreate the writing style of a historical period need an easy, fast way to avoid anachronisms.
Satirists and humorists enjoy parodying the styles of a bygone era for humorous purposes.
Scholars studying old texts use such apps to better understand texts written in the past in context, to avoid anachronistic errors, and to test authorship, among other things.
Benjamin Schmidt, for instance, has created a program for assessing the amount of anachronism in TV scripts.
Benjamin M Schmidt (wordpress.com)
THE DESIGN:
Use Schmidt’s and other “linguistic inquiry” or “word-count” type algorithms as a template to create an app where a user could:
1. Translate a modern text into a text written in the writing style and vocabulary of a particular historical period—say a present-day love-text translated into Shakespearean English,
2. Identify the historical period and dialect of an old text,
3. Identify anachronisms in historical fiction text,
4. Run a word-fingerprint to help identify anonymous communications,
5. Identify the emotional content of texts,
6. Perform in fact any kind of word-count-oriented linguistic inquiry one might require.
CUSTOMERS
I personally think this would be a god-send for viewers and readers like me whose illusion of reality is constantly being kiboshed by anachronistic (or “prochronistic,” as Ben Schmidt would have it) writing style in dramas and stories set in historical epochs whose language style they are familiar with. Moreover, wouldn’t it be wonderful to listen to or read dialogue purportedly spoken or written by a writer of the past and have it actually sound or read like that writer? Think of all those take-offs on Jane Austen that don’t sound like Jane Austen at all.
