Encoding Linguistic Variation in Greek Documentary Papyri: The Past, Present and Future of Editorial Regularization (original) (raw)
"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.
In Sonja Dahlgren, Hilla Halla-aho, Martti Leiwo and Marja Vierros (eds.), Scribes and Language Use in the Graeco-Roman World (Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 147), 23-48. The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters (2025)., 2025
You Know Justice and Law and the Kind of Writing of the Notaries' (Rhet)or(ic)al skills and scribal act in P.Col. inv. 600 (a.k.a. P.Budge), Coptic transcript of a hearing in front of an arbitration council Tonio Sebastian Richter Early Medieval Scribes' Command of Latin Spelling and Grammar: A Quantitative Approach Timo Korkiakangas 221 253
The Spelling of Homophonous Morphemes: Scribal Corrections of 〈Ο, Ω〉 in Greek Documentary Papyri
Symbolae Osloenses 98 (2024), 2024
Interchanges of 〈ο, ω〉 are commonly found in Greek documentary papyri and some of them were even corrected by the ancient scribes. In this paper I show that the majority of those corrections affected the interchange of 〈ο, ω〉 in morphemes, such as confusion between the case endings of the second declension in -ο/-ῳ and -ον/-ων and the suffix vowel of the oblique cases of the ν-, ντ-, ρ-, τ-stems of the third declension. Correction may be prompted by a change of mind on the exact formulation of the phrase, adapting the choice of morphemes accordingly, or a result of contemporary variation in spelling within the paradigm of the third declension. For the second declension endings, I argue that the later correction of homophonous morphemes by the scribes themselves indicates that these interchanges were not due to poor spelling skills but were rather a result of cognitive limitations during language processing, as has also been shown for spelling errors to grammatical homophones in modern languages.
Transactions of the Philological Society 119:3, 289-314, 2021
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.