Julian

I do not recall ever seeing word division in a papyrus text. I must add, however, that I have never really looked at very late papyrus texts, i.e. post-Western Roman Empire. As for sentence division, check out my earlier post regarding breathing spaces. Although such pauses may not fall where we would add a period for grammatical reasons, one could argue that such a space and a modern period serve much the same function.

Julian

Clivedurdle

Yes, that is my point.

We have different languages, different competence of readers - scribes may have been copying without understanding, different assumptions about the texts - its holiness, different types of texts, introductions of later divisions, different understandings with retranscriptions over the centuries.

I am sorry in that lot the error probability rate is huge. I would want detailed forensic data mining of every jot and title! (And isn't jot and title a paraphrase?)

Gamera

The problem with your thesis is that all reading conventions are, well, conventional. Readers adapt to the conventions they have. Graphotactics arose very recently in most writing traditions. Orthography arose even later (at least in English, in which orthography is an issue).

That doesn't mean the readers of a 1st century ms wouldn't have been able to accurately comprehend the ms content. It just means that we have trouble, since we have been taught to read using other conventions.

If you were raised in a writing tradition that used only majuscules with little graphotactics, orthographic standards or spacing, you would be literate in that style of writing. The fact that we aren't is a result of having other conventions, not a result of any inherent incomprehensibility of prior systems.

Clivedurdle

I haven't said prior systems are incomprehensible, only that the room for mutation and misunderstanding is huge, and surely we must check carefully what changes might have happened. Christ annoint Jesus Christ looks an interesting example. Is it a huge game of chinese whispers over the centuries?

Roger Pearse

It isn't.

Much more important than these trivia is the changes of bookhand we see in the west. Beneventan minuscule is very hard for those unfamiliar with it to read. Fortunately relatively few texts pass through a Beneventan-only phase, and we often have the Beneventan mss so we can avoid the problem.

Insular minuscule tends to cause certain errors in those used to Carolingian minuscule. This is more of a problem, since a respectable number of texts owe their preservation to a trip to Ireland or Britain in the early Dark Ages, and then travelled back to Germany (e.g. Fulda) with Irish monks. Consequently if a text has passed through an insular stage, we can sometimes see the effect.

Texts that passed through a Gothic bookhand probably also cause problems to those used to Carolingian, or humanist script.

I've never heard of errors going from capitalis, tho; everyone always understood those, since the larger letters continued to be used as titles.

No. That way obscurantism lies.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Chris Weimer

It's hard to argue with people who have never actually read a manuscript before, Roger. I don't know anyone who'd prefer to read the difficult miniscules - my guess is that they think it's like printed texts. Far from it. So many abbreviations and markings to keep up with/

Or let's face the facts - everything in our past, even Julius Caesar, can possibly be a myth according to Clive's active imagination.

Clivedurdle

I don't appreciate comments like "active imagination" when the first response is exactly to the issue - the other classic one I know is what Jesus said on the cross to one of the thieves.

There is a serious problem here of multiplication of error upon error, people tweaking things for their agendas and understandings.

No one has responded to how do we know annoint is or is not Christ?

I recommend

http://www.pwc.com/extweb/pwcpublica...256DDC006A48F7

about forensic accounting, and when I have clear evidence that this level of analysis has been undertaken, and similar analysis using dna and clade techniques, adapted to this area, I might agree I might have been actively imagining. All I have done now is ask how secure interpretations are - they do not look secure at all.

The other classic example is how Arthur was adapted over the centuries to meet various needs at various times - Henry VIII played up the celtic side for example.

Assume nothing.

Roger Pearse

You're quite right. Abbreviations everywhere in some mss, although not too bad in others (see the Tertullian mss online at my site). I once dated a fragment of a page which had been used as a guard-leaf between 1280 and 1310 purely on the basis of abbreviations used then and at no other time.

Of course. But everything even today could be a lie. We can't live like that, tho.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Clivedurdle

I am not being post modernist here - I am asking for a definition of an error rate. There clearly are huge errors because of punctuation, what might the result be if the various errors misunderstandings editings are iterated?

The Archimedes Codex has a fascinating discussion about diagrams - they vary in various documents, but an original can be deduced.

There is a telling line

Some mutations die out, others survive. Are we clear about which are which? But we do not have originals, so where are we extrapolating back to?

Roger Pearse

Actually I (and I think all the other manuscript buffs) disagreed with you about this, if you recall.

The intelligent copyist can be a nuisance, as, indeed, can the modern editor. This problem was particularly acute in the 19th century, and over the last hundred years editors have generally returned to a more conservative approach.

I'm not clear what point you intend here; if you are asking whether errors occur in transmission (from various causes) the answer is yes. But they don't usually matter much, except to text critics (for whom they are like a trail of bread-crumbs that can be used to remove errors).

All the best,

Roger Pearse