Clivedurdle

Philosopher Jay has commented that "Christ" may be read as annointed.

IFIAMWRITINGEVERYTHINGINCAPITALSHOWDOESANYONEKNOWI FIAMDISUSSINGCHRISTORCHRIST?

Is the change from writing in capitals without gaps to using upper and lower cases with gaps seen as a major translation? What errors of understanding may have crept in?

(Archimedes Codex p78)

Lugubert

Try for starters the discussions on the missing (?) word divider on the Tel Dan stela.

lpetrich

I checked on the history of this feature of typography, and I've found capital letters and lower case. The distinction between the two letter styles emerged in the European Middle Ages, and it was imitated by the users of a few other scripts, the Greek and Cyrillic ones, but as far as I know, no others.

Toto

Could you provide a reference to these discussions and explain why it is relevant?

Tel Dan Stele: Dispute over the phrase "House of David"
But the Koine Greek does not even have a word divider.

Calilasseia

Ah, the vagaries of Greek.

There's a Cambridge textbook for schools here in the UK - Reading Greek - which informs us that originally, from the time of Homer right up to the third century AD, Greek was written entirely in capitals, with no accents, no gaps between words and virtually no punctuation. Which means that, for example, a citizen of Athens reading Attic Greek in the fifth century BC would have needed to be particularly skilled in order to read his own language, because Greek is fully inflected - words consist of a stem followed by a postfix, whose function is to determine grammatical function (case, number and gender for nouns, person, number, tense/aspect, mood and voice for verbs etc). In the case of Greek, the postfixes are critical for meaning, as are the missing accents in the case of some words - τις changes meaning dramatically according to whether there is a rising accent on the iota or not. This becomes even more complicated when one realises that Greek literature involves considerations of metre, which sometimes correlate with accent as used in speech, and sometimes do not (usually this is if import in poetry, but can affect some prose texts as well). Although the Koiné dialect was a kind of lingua franca for commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean (itself being a derivative of Attic) and enjoys better standardisation than some of the earlier dialects, it's still a pain to read in the original if you're used to a language in which words are separated by dividers of some kind.

Mind you, at least Koiné Greek has proper vowels. Ancient Hebrew was written using consonants only, and if you're not a native Hebrew speaker, you have to guess the vowels from context. Markers to distinguish vowels were a later addition. Makes you wonder how these people coped with even the most mundane of writing tasks!

Clivedurdle

Has anyone attempted a comprehensive variant reading of texts?

Roger Pearse

There are two issues here. Firstly there is the issue of majuscule vs minuscule. Secondly there are issues of punctuation and word division.

All books were written in a book hand using majuscule letters -- in the West (my area of knowledge) this means Capitalis (what we today consider capitals). From the 3rd century on a more rounded form of letters came in, known as Uncial. The size of these may be gauged from the fact that the word 'uncia' is the root word of our 'inch'. With the collapse of Roman power various cursives developed from a combination of the above and the Old and New Roman cursive scripts. These did not include upper and lower case (this idea is a renaissance one, I believe) but would use capitalis or uncial, often in red, for titles and other special portions of the text. All of these cursives are really minuscules of one sort or another, but this becomes clearest from the 9th century with the arrival of Carolingian minuscule, which is the ancestor of our lower case letters.

The Romans began to experiment with punctuation in the early Principate, but abandoned this under Greek influence in the 3rd century.

To the best of my knowledge word division is not present in books manufactured in antiquity. But I am more than willing to learn different, of course.

However it doesn't tend to affect the text very much; after all, most of our texts were transliterated into minuscule long before we get to see them. Bear in mind that people tend to write to avoid ambiguity, if they wish to be understood.

In the Greek east the majuscule uncial continues to be the book hand until the 9th century when minuscule arrives.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

This is still largely true in Syriac. I have yet to see a properly vocalised Syriac manuscript. But it doesn't seem to give native speakers problems.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Calilasseia

The attempt by Chinese to develop an enumerable infinity of symbols doesn't pose problems for native Chinese speakers either. What's your point?

The point I'm addressing is that if a language is NOT your native language, and contains constructs that differ radically from those of your own native language, then mastering its intricacies is going to require careful attention to detail. Care and attention in this regard is something that has a habit of flying out of the window when the person handling a document is determined to make that document fit a preconceived agenda. Hebrew, with its lack of written vowels, is particularly suited to such manipulation at the hands of people with agendas, because they can change the meanings of words egregiously with little effort. It's the reason that The Da Vinci Code is a pile of hooey - you can arrange the text and insert vowels to fit your preconceptions with enormous freedom if you so wish. Chances are that if I were to devote the effort, I could find a "prediction" of my own birthdate in there, though why anyone 3,000 years ago would bother to predict my birthdate, given that I'm not (at least last time I checked) a major historical figure, is a moot question.

This brings us to another important question. If someone 3,000 years ago was, for the sake of argument, privy to actual knowledge of our time by some strange means, and that knowledge was considered by that person to be in accord with cherished belief, why hide it? Given the truly febrile desperation of creationists in the present to grasp at any straws that they can in order to "prove" the "truth" of their claims, and their willingness to engage in truly tortuous linguistic and mental gymnastics in pursuit of this aim, one would have thought that anyone who obtained genuine material confirmation of their beliefs would be shouting it from the rooftops, not trying to hide it in ever more arcane cryptographic fog. We have several examples on bulletin boards today (including this one) of individuals who engage in tireless labour to try and "prove" the "historicity" of genesis, despite the fact that the genesis account contains a number of phenomena that are in direct conflict with known physical law, and in direct conflict with what we know about biology. Do you think any of these persons would engage in surreptitious cryptographical obfuscation if they actually acquired solid material proof of their claims? Au contraire, such a proof, were it ever to materialise (and for the reasons already cited, I am confident that it won't) would be trumpeted loudly ad nauseam, and we would all be thoroughly bored stiff by the smugness and self-satisfaction of these people as they took an almost insane delight in throwing in our faces the message "we were right, you were wrong, ha ha".

"Secret" knowledge tends to fall into certain basic categories - one, details kept hidden where possible for reasons of military advantage, two, details kept secret as a means of distinguishing between an "us" and a "them", and three, details kept secret as a means of preserving an aura of mystery surrounding a doctrine, all the better to persuade the proles at the bottom of the pile that the initiates and the self-appointed dialectically trained élites of this world somehow deserve the privileged positions that they abrogate to themselves when telling the rest of us how to think and how to run our lives.

Roger Pearse

I'm not sure which part of what I wrote caused you a problem. The point that was I making was that absence of vowels does not seem to be a problem we might imagine in languages accustomed to their absence.

This seems to be conspiracy theory, tho, unless you have some concrete instances that you would like to offer.

The remainder of your comment did not seem to relate to the thread, and was of no special interest to me, so I have snipped it.

All the best,

Roger Pearse