Riverwind

Come on, Nazaroo. Quit playing games with people or answer questions for goodness sake.

Despite what you think, if you'd actually present another case where one of your text-critical marks actually represents another variant it would help. Instead, you say that everything but the one mark that you want to be a text-critical mark is likely a later scribal insertion. Why not the one that you like, then? What makes it important compared to all the others? Oh, yeah, the "space and dot", right? How the heck do you quantify that??? You keep speaking of scientific analysis but then you avoid the scientific questions...

It's no wonder you're winding up on everyone's ignore list. Try a little harder to support your views or just leave. If you're playing games with people, then it's annoying. If you're just looney, then I guess I don't really know what to tell you....keep up the, um...er...good work {secretly hitting the ignore button}.

Sauron

Was there a reason why you didn't answer the straightforward true/false scenario above?

But the bank may be wrong. The check might be good. I might have simply made a mistake, and then gone back and fixed it myself. Sometimes fixes are sloppy. But they are still my original text. Therefore, the presence/absence of a space is not a useful indicator of tampering.

But you've said that you cannot be certain of anything here. You want to rely on spacing, but spacing is not a reliable indicator of original vs. later additions.

If you're trying to say that we will accept as original ONLY those dots that show clear spacing on either side, then other questions still tumble out:

1. Why did you decide this? What prevents the original scribal work from having left a generous amount of spacing, and then someone coming along later and inserting a dot? For example, if a later scribe saw the original, extra spacing, they might be worried that someone might try to fill it in, perhaps by inserting an unauthorized change. So this later scribe might want to prevent that from happening by inserting a dot to fill up the space (or at least make it easy to detect any future tampering).

2. If you're admitting the possibility of tossing away valid, original dots because the spacing is too tight, then what kind of boundaries does that put on any of your conclusions? It seems to me that your statements ought to be highly tentative.

On the contrary; I understand financial institutions quite well (part of being an MBA student). But your example has a flaw, and there are unanswered questions.

But that is a non-tangent example. Paternity suits can be settled to within 10 billion to 1 certainty, using DNA. With these manuscripts, you're trying to rely on spacing. But I've yet to hear a reliable way to visually differentiate the original dots vs. later additions, based on the spacing.

In fact, I haven't heard a solid argument yet as to why dots inserted into 'narrow' spaces should be suspicious in the first place.

Nazaroo

The point is, if the bank is wrong in not cashing the cheque, there is no danger, no loss, only a minor inconvenience. If the bank chose the opposite rule, fraud would run rampant.

So space IS a useful indicator of tampering, even when it is not 100% correct. Its correct often enough, and the consequences are serious enough, to justify a rule that doesn't have to be 'perfect'.

Not really, within the limits of reasonable probability we can be quite certain that most dots WITH a space are authentic, while most dots WITHOUT a space have an unknown and probably unknowable status. We don't need a 'perfect' rule to do historical science, only a statistically probable one.

Its the most sensible rule possible under the circumstances.

Absolutely nothing, in principle. But we can simply inspect the manuscript to see if this is a statistically significant possibility. In the case of codex Sinaiticus, there are more spaces than spaces with dots, so it is unlikely that a corrector went along filling up spaces.

Indeed. And this sometimes happened, that a scribe would fill up the end of a row of letters, or add a flourish to the end of a book to prevent someone adding to it. But most of these cases can be identified, and we simply don't find scribes using DOTS for this purpose, but rather OTHER larger glyphs, like pointed arrow-brackets and mini-scrolls. And again in the case of Sinaiticus, this just didn't happen. We have to move from the general to the specific.

In fact, I'm certain of tossing away a few valid dots highly likely to be have been from the original scribe. But not enough to significantly skew the results of a study of the purpose of the dots, which is the whole point.

As a test, we can always insert the other dots back into our data and see if there is a significant difference, or a new purpose suggested by the new larger group of dots that might change our conclusions.

But instead of worrying about a bunch of 'what ifs', we can proceed ahead and test and get answers. So why worry?

I'm not claiming the accuracy of DNA testing. Nor should I, nor do I need to. I just want the most probable or likely case.
Well, its reliable enough.

Most people can easily understand that marks added AFTER the manuscript was written, and squeezed into the cracks and margins are most likely to be by ANY unknown hand, especially when we KNOW that a dozen hands have worked the manuscript over.

Most people would only accept marks that look like they likely were made by the original scribe. And these would have to be marks that looked like they belonged there, because the scribe planned for them and allocated space for them.

The answer is right in front of your nose. Marks that have a secondary appearance should naturally be treated with suspicion, when we already KNOW that tampering and corrections are plentiful on this very manuscript.

Sauron

How many times has spacing been used to establish - with reasonable certainty - that tampering has occurred?

That implies that:
1. we have cases where we are reasonably certain that tampering has occurred, based upon spacing; and

2. we have cases where we are reasonably certain are original spaces with original dots.

How many of each case do we have? At what locations in the text?

Well, then we get to the question of how much space are we talking about? Ie., there are no blank spaces over 4cm that have not been filled in with something, or 50% of blank spaces 3cm in width or greater are filled in.

Right. But if the space in question wasn't a large one (like an end-of-row space), then they might use something smaller than a flourish or larger glyph. Something like a dot.

OK, so we seem to be talking about a data set here that is amenable to statistical analysis. Where can I find that data set?

Indeed. Let's have the data set.

Nazaroo

Indeed, and you can either use patience to acquire them through me, as I can find time to organize and format them in a way suitable for the internet, or you can independantly fetch the data set yourself, especially since trust is rare commodity around here.

Toto

Some meta-discussion has been split off here.

Nazaroo

And, - the actual number of such possible cases is less than 5% of the total number of 'dot and space' cases that are found in the middle of a line.

That is, the apparent short ends of lines where a space of one or two characters has possibly been filled with a decorative or preventative 'dot' is insignificant. We can establish this by simply counting them and discovering that there are far less than there are dots embedded in the text proper.

Steven Avery

And I'll look forward to your giving the data set, especially examples that match the interpretation of the dot after John 7:52 (post 19)
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...72#post4428072
representing an omission. Even one or two samples would add a lot to the discussion.

On the one after 8:12 I do not understand why you would omit that as from the original scribe (whatever the meaning). You point out that the space is extra at the end of the line. Therefore deliberate, it would seem, and therefore designed to be a dot-indicator. Why exclude it from the data set ?

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Nazaroo

The short answer is that we have less surety about it than a case where a space is left in the middle of a line where the normal practice is not even to put spaces between words, and even to break up words over to the next line.

Yes, the space at the end of the line (a couple of letters in size) has a significant appearance, but its very rarity works against its weighting. lines are left unfilled by letters so rarely that we must admit the sampling is an order in magnitude smaller in size (per unit text) than the normal case of a space in midline.

Some of the strength in the type of phenomenon comes from its statistical base or 'sample size'. Even if we can't quantify such features with hard numbers, we can at least order them in terms of relative magnitude and importance.

We can always say that examining the cases of 'space and dot' in the middle of lines will give us more reliable information, because there are more cases.

Another thing works in our favour here too. Because the case of a dot at the end of a line is so much rarer, we can ignore it with less worry about the result of our analysis.

This is not to say that we should or need to ignore any data, but you are perfectly familiar I am sure, of the idea of the relative weight of different qualities and kinds of witness to a fact.

We can ignore the handful of cases of a dot at the end of a line, because they are so rare and relatively insignificant for our question of what MOST of the dots are doing.

We should ignore this handful of cases, because we are less sure that they are from the original hand, since we have a less certain indicator than a simple single space tailored to the size of the dot.

Steven Avery

The problem is that there is another factor, one that you mentioned in another context. This is the same book, the same manuscript, the same page. (And the dot is almost surely the same scribe.) Ergo such an example is far more significant in trying to understand how this scribe meant the dot than most others in the forthcoming data set. Same scribe, same text, same time.

You might weigh it a smidgen less because it is end-of-line rather than mid-line. However the upsides above are more important than being at the end-of-line. Especially as we can see immediately that the end-of-line spacing is ususual for that scribe on that page. We can compare it visually with eight other lines and note that it has an extra character off all of them, a strong marker for the dot being related to the first scribe's text.

Shalom,
Steven Avery