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Comment by jolmg | Hacker News Reader

> explicación poética

> There are, again, a couple errors here: it should be “explicación phisica” [physical explanation] not “poetic explanation” in the first line, for instance.

The image seems to say "phicica" (with a "c"), but that's not Spanish. "ph" is not even a thing in Spanish. "Physical" is "física", at least today, IDK about the 1700's. So, if you try to make sense of it in such a way that you assume a nonsense word is you misreading rather than the writer "miswriting", I can see why it assumes it might say "poética", even though that makes less sense semantically.

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Author here, I agree that my read may not be correct either. It’s tough to make out. Although keep in mind that “ph” is used in Latin and Greek (or at least transliterations of Greek into the Roman alphabet) so in an early modern medical context (I.e. one in which it is assumed the reader knows Latin, regardless of the language being used) “ph” is still a plausible start to a word. Early modern spelling in general is famously variable - common to see an author spell the same word two different ways in the same text.

> So, if you try to make sense of it in such a way that you assume a nonsense word is you misreading

> I agree that my read may not be correct either

Just in case, by "you", I meant from the POV of the AI, not you the author.

That's interesting to know about "ph". I didn't know it was present in Latin, and I wonder if that's also the case with Spanish.

I just looked in the Corpus Diacrónico del Español

https://corpus.rae.es/cordenet.html

and it found 33 hits for "phisica" and 99 for "phisico", mostly from the 1490s. Now some of these can be deceptive, like a few are from a bilingual Spanish-Latin book and occur in the Latin portions rather than the Spanish portions, but it seems like some authors in the 1400s wrote "ph" in some Spanish words, at least when they knew the Latin or Greek etymologies.

I don't know when the Iberian languages first got their more phonetic orthographies, especially suppressing that h (that was originally in Latin digraphs used to transliterate Greek letters θ, φ, χ).

Edit: There are also about two dozen hits for physico/physica, interestingly more from the 1700s rather than 1400s.

> but it seems like some authors in the 1400s wrote "ph" in some Spanish words, at least when they knew the Latin or Greek etymologies.

You know, that might be analogous to Spanish speakers familiar with English writing "tweet" in Spanish text, while being ignorant that RAE added "tuit"[1] to the language, which is more in-line with general language rules. IDK if any Spanish speaker has ever written "tuit" in real life.

[1] https://dle.rae.es/tuit?m=form

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