Net2004

in this post

spin in response to achristian wrote in this post:

You haven’t been listening. You don’t know any such thing.

An image. Have you ever played the game Chinese Whispers? Seriously,
have you? One person is given a message which they whisper to the next
person, who in turn whispers what is heard to the next person and so
on along a chain people until you get to the last, the person who must
finally tell everyone what their understanding of the message is. It
is invariably extremely different from the original. This is the
imprecise nature of human understand and transmission of knowledge.

The shorter the chain, the closer to the original is the last message.
The written word gives the transmission a lot more stability but the
same issues come to play. The individual scribe brings his own
understanding to the transmission process. Think of a scribe who was
working on a Bezae type tradition in France, say at the St Irenaeus
Monastery. The monk is sent off to northern Illyria and works on
copies of a different manuscript tradition. The forms of the Bezae
tradition will Creep into the transmission process of this different
tradition.

Say you are a scribe in Syria, working on copies within the AntioCHENE
tradition. The Arabs invade and most christians are driven out
including you. The Antiochene tradition suddenly disappears, though
you as a refuge go to central Anatolia and work on another tradition
inadvertently including your familiar Antiochene tradition into it.
Cross-fertilization is evident in manuscript traditions. Why else do
manuscripts that predominantly follow one tradition suddenly have a
few features of another tradition?

The Antiochene tradition has been exterminated because of the Arab
conquest. This means that although you have some early manuscripts,
that tradition will have no later manuscripts, except perhaps for
early escapees such as the Bezae variation, which has already gone to
France and started absorbing features of western tradition, because of
the background of the scribes who work upon it. But then Bezae isn’t
the common form there so it isn’t afrequently used manuscript so it
doesn’t get much copying.

We expect places such as Egypt, Syria, North Africa and Anatolia to
suffer from the Arab conquests, causing havoc amongst the manuscript
traditions found in those areas. We also expect the secure monasteries
of Europe to churn out their manuscript traditions, while the
Egyptian, Syrian and other traditions stop producing to any quantity
if any at all. Hence a profusion of European texts.

What is the relationship between those European produced manuscripts
and the original? There is after all a vast number of manuscripts from
Europe. That there is a vast number means nothing about the original.
We just see the European survivor traditions reduplicating
themselves.

Because there are very many German speakers can we assume that modern
German better represents the original Germanic language than Gothic,
Frankish or Lombard for which there are no speakers of those languages
left in the world? Can we assume because there are more pizzerias in
America than in Italy that American pizza is more genuine? The
argument based on merely numbers is fallacious. You actually need to
know the trajectory involved. All those pizza hut pizzas derive from a
modern aberrant tradition.



hello people

is it possible to see some examples of what i have highlighted above .

Toto

hello Net2004 -

Can you tell me where you copied this from?

Net2004

http://www.freeratio.org/thearchives...273738&page=16