Going Forward to Yesterday, Part II: I Love to Decode

. My January 16 posting "Going Forward to Yesterday" was about a weak parallel between the excruciating efforts of scholars to decipher text in Aramaic and Hebrew in the faded and/or fragmented Dead Sea Scrolls and my pitiful attempt to restore some text, in English, from some shards of a broken page. Nonetheless it is like "air guitar": one gets a bit of a thrill of imitating the art of the Real People.

. There were four stages to my quest: . 1) assemble the pieces into their likely original places, despite missing sections; 2) do optical character recognition (OCR) to attempt to turn the image into text; 3) correct the mistakes made by OCR --there were many-- and turn it into the maximum recognizable text; 4) identify the original document from which the page fell out.

. Actually the OCR step was not really necessary, but I included it to simulate the lack of clarity even in the reconstructed document. After visually examining the document, comparing to the OCR and extrapolating, here is the clarified text that I guessed was as close to the original as could be made:

. "Our primary need, then, is to continue the faith in a Government which during four consecutive years has given proof of its attachment to the cause of good government, of its sincere and ardent desire to promote everything to perpetuate its tradition of progress, and conduct the Province to the high position which nature destined it to achieve. And with this faith alike in the Government and in the future of our Province, let us continue to invest, with courage, our accumulated wealth, in the development of the Province's resources; let us be true ..."

. Now using any physical and contextual clues I attempted t0 hypothesize what the source document was.

1) It is from an English-speaking country. 2) Province is capitalized as if referring to a specific political division that would be clear to the reader; 3) a four-year term (not included in excerpt I provided above) evinces a non-parliamentary government or a government official chosen by regular elections.

. From these three clues I surmised it is a document from a Canadian province and that it is either from -- or defending the regime of -- the provincial premier, perhaps one running for re-election.

4) The mention of development as if it were a current issue and the fact that the list includes only natural resources implies a western province or the northern area of an Eastern province 5) the inhabitants have an inferiority complex at that, implying a frontier society; 6) the back of the page, numbered 28, appears to have been stuck to a flimsy cover, as if it were the last page of a very short paperback document; 7) the mention of "accumulated wealth" and "return from otehr lands" are curve balls. Why would citizens leave a place charcterized by wealth, unless perhaps the wirter is speaking of his own wealth, and the common folk left for economic reasons not mentioned, but impled by the apologetic and exhortatory style 8) appears written in the flowery style common in pre-World War II formal writing.

. I'll go out on a limb and guess -- based on the above and the flimsy extrapolation from the fact there is no French translation and no francocisms crept into the writer's vocabulary, that it is: Ontario (or possibly neighboring Saskatchewan).