Talk:Thomas Shelton (translator)

Relationship
Any chance this man is related to the Sheltons of the shipwrecked Sea Venture? Jahiliyyah 22:17, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Fundamentally flawed
Other than Wright's (perfectly reasonable) claim in 1898, where is the evidence that Shelton was English? The overwhelming amount of evidence today indicates that he was an Irishman from Dublin. The Dictionary of National Biography says he 'was probably the third of seven sons of Henry Shelton (d. c.1605), a Dublin merchant imprisoned in 1596 for refusing to take the oath of supremacy when he was elected sheriff, and his wife Margaret, the sister of Peter Nangle, guardian of the Franciscan convent at Armagh, and thorn in the side of the authorities. He was more than 'acquainted with the "cries of the wild Irish,"' being by all accounts one of them and was certainly not 'honestly employed in carrying letters to persons in England from Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam'. His connections with Richard Nugent- son of the poet, traitor and erstwhile rebel, William Nugent- are well documented, as is his role on the side of Aodh Mór Ó Néill against the English during the Nine Years War. Indeed, in 1597 there is a 'Thomas Shelton, Dublinensis' listed as a student in Salamanca, a fact which further links the translator to Dublin. Does anybody have any objection to my coming back and editing this accordingly some day? 193.1.172.163 14:53, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
 * No, please do so, this is valuable information if it's added with reliable references. -- Kliojünger (from the German wikipedia) 20:28, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Wrong identification with the shorthand inventor
I've just removed the sentence from the article, "He is also apparently the Thomas Shelton who developed an early system of shorthand, published in 1626 with the title Short Writing, later reissued as Tachygraphy; this system was used by Samuel Pepys to write his diary."

No, he was not, and this sentence brought in by a user in 2006 only seems to be a wrong private hypothesis. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), p. 221–223, the shorthand inventor Thomas Shelton and the Don Quixote translator Thomas Shelton were two different persons. They also were provably of different ages, because the 1647 edition of Thomas Shelton's shorthand instruction Tachygraphy gives its author's age as forty-six, so he must have been born in 1600/01 - at this time the Don Quixote translator Thomas Shelton must have already been grown up. -- Kliojünger (from the German wikipedia) 20:28, 8 November 2009 (UTC)


 * And not to forget, also the writing systems tag has to be removed now. -- Kliojünger (from the German wikipedia) 12:15, 15 December 2009 (UTC)