Encoding Linguistic Variation in Greek Documentary Papyri: The Past, Present and Future of Editorial Regularization (original) (raw)
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"Greek Medical Papyri: Text, Context, Hypertext", edited by Nicola Reggiani, Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2019
It might be not so original to start with the traditional description of a variant as a deviation of a text from its archetype, but here exactly lies the similarity between linguistic and philological variants, on which the following pages will be focused. Both conceal the assumption that we need to emend a text in order to reach a virtual textual exactness with reference to one, single archetype, and in both cases the critical editor will print what he assumes to be the 'correct' form in the text, relegating the deviating 'anomaly' in the apparatus. While a philological variant is usually defined after a comparison with another version of the same text, papyrus documents in most cases appear to be unique texts. 1 They are, according to the terminology of textual criticism, 'single witnesses', and their 'variants' and 'errors' are usually intended as related not to an archetypical text, but to a standard reference language: Koine Greek. One of the most striking editorial outcomes of the choice of this 'linguistic archetype' is the somehow fluctuating treatment of word forms that deviates from 'classical' Greek. 2 As a tacit rule, what is in fact a 'linguistic variant' with respect to classical Greek is assumed to be the 'regular' form, in a more or less conscious consideration of the cultural and linguistic environment of the papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt. Nevertheless, the situation is not that clear, and sometimes we do find sporadic editorial 'regularizations' that do not relate to outright scribal mistakes, 3 as traces of * This lecture was first delivered in Trier on June 30, 2016, in the framework of the "Vorträge im Rahmen des Kolloquiums 'Probleme des griechisch-römischen Ägypten'". My grateful thanks to Fabian Reiter for the kind invitation. An updated Italian version has been presented at the "Greek Medical Papyri" conference. The paper falls into the project "Online Humanities Scholarship: A Digital Medical Library Based on Ancient Texts" (ERC-AdG-2013-DIGMEDTEXT, Grant Agreement No. 339828, Principal Investigator: Prof. Isabella Andorlini), funded by the European Research Council at the University of Parma. 1 Cf. Youtie, Criticism, 13-15. For the cases of copies and duplicates, see below. 2 A thorough discussion of this topic can be found in Stolk, Encoding. 3 The most typical example is constituted by the verbal voices of ginomai, Koine form of classical gignomai (For the loss/assimilation of gamma before ny cf. Mayser, Grammatik I, 164-6 [Ptolemaic age]; Gignac, Grammar I, 176 [Roman age]; in the Byzantine age gamma comes back), which in the Open Access.
Spelling deviations are often considered to be the result of random variation or plain mistakes by the scribes. Based on the examples in this paper, I argue that some of the apparent deviations may actually be in accordance with contemporary norms. Close study of the spelling of five lexemes in the corpus of documentary papyri shows that the orthographic conventions at the time may have been different than suggested by contemporary grammarians and modern editors. Keywords post-classical Greekorthographydocumentary papyrivariation and changescribesgrammarians Greek progressively failed to reflect a radically changing pronunciation, so that by 1 See e.g. Horrocks 2010, 88-188. 2 See Horrocks 2010, 82. following four criteria for determining the correct spelling, originally used for textual criticism: analogy (ἀναλογία), namely the formulation of general propositions based on comparison of words, dialect (διάλεκτος) by comparison of special forms in different language varieties, etymology (ἐτυμολογία) based on the origin of words and history (ἱστορίαπαράδοσις), which informs us about how the word is used in the literary textual tradition. 6 3
Itacism from Zenon to Dioscorus: scribal corrections of <ι> and <ει> in Greek papyri
i n P r o c e e d i n g s o f t h e 2 8 t h C o n g r e s s o f P a p y r o l o g y B a r c e l o n a 1 -6 A u g u s t 2 0 1 6 E d i t e d b y A l b e r t o N o d a r & S o f í a T o r a l l a s T o v a r C o e d i t e d b y Ma r í a J e s ú s A l b a r r á n Ma r t í n e z , R a q u e l Ma r t í n H e r n á n d e z , I r e n e P a j ó n L e y r a , J o s é -D o mi n g o R o d r í g u e z Ma r t í n & Ma r c o A n t o n i o S a n t a ma r í a S c r i p t a Or i e n t a l i a 3 B a r c e l o n a , 2 0 1 9
The Corpus of the Greek Medical Papyri and a New Concept of Digital Critical Edition
"Digital Papyrology II: Case Studies on the Digital Edition of Ancient Greek Papyri", edited by Nicola Reggiani, Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2018
study: 16 texts are continuously published, updated, collected, revised, corrected, emended, republished, and there is hunger for resources that can help handling an overwhelming amount of primary data. 17 It is -to borrow the successful concept that Zygmunt Bauman launched to emphasize the fact of change in the modern times 18a 'liquid' philology, for which digital environments seem extremely fitting; in particular, collaborative platforms like SoSOL seem the most suitable incarnation of this complex and fluid editorial workflow. 19 Moreover, Papyrology has always been facing an adventurous textual situation, having to cope with fragmentary and unique texts and idiosyncratic utterances, and has developed a remarkable interest in the scribal and material phenomenology of textual features and transmission, which affects consistency in treating the wide series of textual fluctuations occurring in the papyri. Indeed, while philological analysis would gladly treat fluctuations as deviations from a standard archetype (i.e. mistakes or, more gently, variants) and normalize them in a reconstructed critical edition, they actually bear significant socio-cultural relevance and are of fundamental importance from the viewpoint of the phenomenology of the papyrus texts, its interpretation, and ancient writing culture in general. In other words, very often fluctuations are not used to reconstruct a text but to investigate relevant socio-cultural phenomena. Accordingly, the papyrologists' behaviour towards such textual flavours is twofold, and generates a wide variety of editorial inconsistencies that affect printed editions as well as digital databanks.
The Greek documentary papyri (300 BCE-700 CE) provide an interesting corpus for linguistic study due to the large amount of linguistic variation. Variation in spelling is traditionally used as evidence for phonological changes in the post-Classical Greek language. The interchange of graphemes, however, does not only depend on the pronunciation of the corresponding phoneme. In this paper I examine the cognitive processes behind the production of non-standard Greek orthography in more detail by applying an interactive dual-route model for spelling. If two graphemes are pronounced identically in the spoken language, the final choice between one grapheme or the other is likely to be based on cognitive and social aspects, such as the general frequency and probability of spelling patterns in the language, previous exposure of the writer to other lexemes and morphemes in the language and local scribal conventions, to name just a few factors. On the basis of examples of the frequent interchanges of <e, ai> and <o, ō>, I show how these other factors can contribute to a better interpretation of spelling production in documentary papyri.
Novel Perspectives on Communication Practices in Antiquity. Towards a Historical Social-Semiotic Approach. Ghent, 03-05.10.2019
Among the many ways in which Latin papyri, a recent and elusive branch of papyrology, can be classified, is the division between papyri where Latin is present as a proper text, with syntactic articulation and a message to convey to the reader; and papyri where Latin is present at only a formulaic level. The former set includes an increasing number of Latin documents on papyrus and ostrakon (currently studied, re-published and published within the project PLATINUM), mostly from Egypt, which testify the needs of Roman citizens and businessmen in that province in the first three centuries of the Empire. The latter set, particularly represented in Late Antiquity till the last centuries of Byzantine Egypt, includes documents where Latin has been often confined to formulae and subscriptions, all produced within provincial bureaux. In this case, the formulae do not do so much as conveying information to the reader at a textual level (this is what the main text does); what they do is determining the status and the relevance of the document in which they are inserted. Three sub-groups can be identified in this set of documents: (1) Greek official letters from provincial authorities to lower ranks, provided with Latin dating formulae in the left and lower margins – a custom which mimics the proceedings of Imperial chanceries producing leges datae; (2) a more miscellaneous subset of letters, complaints and reports in Greek bearing a Latin name, in dative or nominative case, sometimes followed by a rank, as a marginal tag to the document itself; (3) an even more heterogeneous subset, and the object of the present paper: documents sealed by Latin formulae such as legi, bene uale, subscripsi, recognoui, signaui and the like. Whereas in groups (1) and (2) the Latin formula is written by a clerk, in (3) one can often see the very hand of a high-ranking official, with all his graphic peculiarities; his personal – often archaic – tendencies; and his choice of words. Autograph formulae, despite the little amount of text they yield, can uncover several particulars about the education of the subscriber and his relation with his world. One is reminded of a legi in P.Vindob. inv. L 116 (4th-5th AD), still written in ancient Roman cursive; or of the subscribers in the Italian gesta municipalia, whose bene uale still employ the b panse-à-gauche well into the 7th AD. The present paper offers a full survey of such formulae in papyri and ostraka from the two partes Imperii; it attempts at distinguishing those formulae which were informally used and had no strict meaning, from those legally required and unequivocally determined; it analyses the writing practice of the subscribing officers, their graphical education and milieu (Greek or Latin?), and their compliance – or resistance – to the contemporary trends of Roman cursive writing.