Transcription

“ The complexity introduced into the transmission of ancient texts by mixture needs no comment. Where the mixture has been accompanied or preceded by such licence in transcription as we find in the New Testament, the complexity can evidently only increase the precariousness of printed texts formed without taking account of the variations of text which preceded mixture. ”

“ Proper names, technical expressions, quotations from foreign languages, and frequent change of subject, are all likely to cause difficulty to a scribe and error in his work.
Careful and continuous regard to the various kinds of errors and defaults that are found in transcription will enable us to judge whether a reading which it is suggested stood in the archetype of our text is likely to have been corrupted to the reading, or readings, which stand in the extant manuscripts or editions. ”

“ The books of the New Testament have had to share the fate of other ancient writings in being copied again and again during more than fourteen centuries down to the invention of printing and its application to Greek literature.
7. Every transcription of any kind of writing involves the chance of the introduction of some errors: and even if the transcript is revised by comparison with its exemplar or immediate original, there is no absolute security that all the errors will be corrected. ”

“ Hence the basis on which Transcriptional Probability rests consists of generalisations as to the causes of corruption incident to the process of transcription. A few of the broadest generalisations of this kind, singling out observed proclivities of average copyists, make up the bulk of what are not very happily called 'canons of criticism'. Many causes of corruption are independent of age and language, and their prevalence may be easily verified by a careful observer every day ”

“ But boys were never employed on the Gospels, or Church service books, these being reserved for men of perfect age, who would bring greater care to their responsible task. We have even the copy ordinarily set for beginners in the monastic scriptorium, a doggerel line, introducing every letter of the alphabet:
“Adnexique globum Zephyrique Kanna secabant.” That the labour of transcription was often exceedingly irksome, is evident from sundry notes scattered over these manuscripts. “As the sick man desireth health,” writes one, “even so doth the transcriber desire the end of his volume.” ”

“ Greek substantives, for which the rules of Latin transcription should be followed." Many examples are given.
In regard to transcription, a word may be said in behalf of the English-speaking peoples. Our pronunciation vividly accentuates the difference between a long vowel and a short one, yet we have but one symbol for both sounds throughout our vowel system. There is nothing in the form of the letters to prevent a man's saying Amphibōla, Hydrophīlus, or Hippopotāmus. How much the young have suffered through false quantities is an untold sum of human misery. But they harass not boys alone. ”

“ The rate cannot always be uniform: the professional training of scribes can rarely obliterate individual differences of accuracy and conscientiousness, and moreover the current standard of exactness will vary at different times and places and in different grades of cultivation. The number of transcriptions, and consequent opportunities of corruption, cannot be accurately measured by difference of date, for at any date a transcript might be made either from a contemporary manuscript or from one written any number of centuries before. ”

“ Comment Hmm. I don't see the Index: pages as problematic. But the "Not Proofread" Page: pages that were, as you say, created by Match & Split from a secondary transcription (mostly Gutenberg, but also other sources) , I do consider problematic. We don't permit secondary transcriptions added directly to mainspace, so to permit them in Page: makes no sense. ”

“ He speaks of a ‘partial collation’ of the MS., 73 but this appears to have been nothing more than a transcription of certain fragmentary parts of the MS. One of these passages is printed in the Introduction, where it is referred to as an ‘exact transcript’; yet, in collating it with the Zupitza Autotypes, I have found the following errors:—
Of course the faded condition of the MS. offers some excuse for one or two of these errors, but, if we encounter mistakes in a short transcript professedly exact, what would have been the fate of the text had the entire MS. been collated? ”

“ As regards Intrinsic Evidence, it must, to attain complete certainty, be worthy of the second form of affirmation noticed above, that is, be so exactly and perfectly suitable to the place that it cannot but be right; or, to attain reasonable probability, it must be quite suitable to the place positively, and free from all incongruity negatively. As regards Transcriptional Evidence, it must be capable of explaining how the transmitted text could naturally arise out of it in accordance with the ordinary probabilities of transcription. ”

“ Because of the quality of the microcopy, the transcription was checked against a copy owned by Fordham University, a digitized version of which is posted by the Internet Archive at:
archive.org/details/TroughtonShortSweet
In general, this transcription attempts to retain the formatting, punctuation and spelling of the source text. Thus, variant spellings such as “lieve,” “doat,” “one’self,” and “extacies” as well as words and spellings intended for comic effect such as “horrorble” and “tremengeous” have been retained. ”

“ For it is evident that if the practice of mutilation, interpolation, and corruption, had to any considerable extent been admitted, the existing remains of ancient authors, after so long a time, would have retained scarcely a trace of integrity or uniformity. A licentious practice of transcription, operating through the course of a thousand or fifteen hundred years, must have resulted, not in giving us the connected and consistent works we actually possess, but only a heterogeneous mass of mangled fragments. ”

“ Wikisource, run on the same wiki platform as Wikipedia, has a number of features that make it a great tool for transcribing documents. By the time it is completed, each document’s transcription will have been proofread by one human and then validated by another. ”

“ Vast bulk of people here are neither net nor image geeks, they are interested in the magic of the word, and its transcription. Predominantly none of us has worried about the image scans having the Google component, and as it doesn't affect our transcription and presentation, we politely ignore it. ”

“ Transcription errors Our articles are transcribed from the originals by volunteers, sometimes directly and sometimes by correcting a preliminary OCR conversion. While we strive for perfect accuracy, there may be transcription errors in the articles. The scanned images of the original pages may be accessed from the page number links to the left of the text in each article to allow the reader to verify the transcription. ”

“ The following memorandum, in Byron's handwriting, is prefixed to the Transcription:—
"This copy is to be printed from—subject to comparison with the original MS. (from which this is a transcription) in such parts as it may chance to be difficult to decypher in the following. The notes in this copy are more complete and extended than in the former—and there is also one stanza more inserted and added to this, viz. the 33d. B.
Byron. July l0th, 1816.⁠
Diodati, near ye Lake of Geneva." ”

“ Singular and subsingular readings of א and other MSS
326. Turning from Β to א, we find ourselves dealing with the handiwork of a scribe of different character. The omissions and repetitions of small groups of letters are rarely to be seen; but on the other hand all the ordinary lapses due to rapid and careless transcription are more numerous, including substitutions of one word for another, as when γινώσκει αὐτούς replaces σκηνώσει ἐπ’ αὐτούς in Apoc. ”

“ On the margin of the tracts are several short notes by the transcriber, referring to his own times, such as this, “our case at this day in Scotland, 1603.” This ascertains the date of their transcription; and I think it highly probable that they were copied by Mr John Welsh, a son‐in‐law of the Reformer, one of whose letters is inserted on some blank leaves in the middle of the volume. The letters have evidently been written by the same person (although the hand appears older) ; and, on the margin of a treatise at the end of them, “1603” occurs. ”

“ When, however, we use phonetical transcription already at the first stage, it is partly on account of the excellent help which it will afford later for quite a different purpose, which I shall come to immediately, partly because it really is of some help in the teaching of the sound-formation proper. It saves the teacher a great deal of repetition, since instead of always saying the sound himself, he can point to the symbol and get one of the clever pupils to say it for the others ”

“ But readings answering to this description cannot be judged rightly without taking into account the general characteristics of other readings exhibited by the same or allied documents. The comparison leaves little room for doubt that they merely belong to an extreme type of paraphrastic alteration, and are not essentially different from readings which betray an equally lax conception of transcription, and yet are transparently guiltless of any fraudulent intention. In a word, they bear witness to rashness, not to bad faith. ”

“ Are there any topical interests you have that we could help you with in order to find your feet here? If nothing else, perhaps you would like to help us clean up the OCR of our Proofread of the Month - fixing a red page should only take a minute or two. If there is another work you would like to see a high fidelity edition of, we'll find it and set up a transcription project. ”

“ Orthography deals with elements of text transmitted uninterruptedly, with more or less of purity, from the autographs to the extant MSS. In passing next from the letters to the various marks which custom and convenience require to be affixed to them, we leave, with one partial exception, the domain of the written tradition. Whether the autographs contained Breathings, Accents, and the like, it is impossible to know. None exist in the earlier uncials of the New Testament, and it is morally certain that they were not included in transcription during a succession of centuries ”

“ Work in progress Some articles, although present, may be in a very unfinished state: images and diagrams may need to be included; tables may need to be formatted; the text may need formatting and proofreading, and may be incomplete. For transcriptions that are transclusions, a color bar at the upper left will indicate the condition of the article: yellow or green indicates the text has been proofread. For transcriptions that are not tranclusions, many times there is an indicator of text quality in the upper right. ”

“ The footnote has been numbered and appears in this transcription as footnote 826.
Page 270 (footnote 898) : Transcribed "pamplet" as "pamphlet". As originally printed: "the following account published in a pamplet...."
In the table showing Spanish Reals sent to the Holy Land, the individual contributions by country in this transcription match the figures in the original publication; however, the total Reals stated in the original publication (239,737,060) does not match the sum of the countries' contributions (239,927,060) . ”

“ The only quite trustworthy evidence from internal character for derivation from a common proximate original consists in the presence of such erroneous identical readings as are evidently due to mere carelessness or caprice of individual scribes, and could not easily have escaped correction in passing through two or three transcriptions. To carry weight, they must of course be too many to be naturally accounted for by accidental coincidence of error in two independent scribes. ”

“ Contrast of real and apparent excellence is in any given variation an indispensable criterion as to the adequacy of the evidence for justifying reliance on Transcriptional Probability.
36. Fortunately variations conforming to this normal type are of frequent occurrence; variations, that is, in which a critic is able to arrive at a strong and clear conviction that one reading is intrinsically much the most probable, and yet to see with equal clearness how the rival reading or readings could not but be attractive to average transcribers. ”

“ The next step in criticism is the discovery of Transcriptional Probability, and is suggested by the reflexion that what attracts ourselves is not on the average unlikely to have attracted transcribers. If one various reading appears to ourselves to give much better sense or in some other way to excel another, the same apparent superiority may have led to the introduction of the reading in the first instance. ”

“ The processes which they were compelled to employ have in many cases visibly affected the fidelity of their transcriptions. We have therefore felt ourselves compelled, much to our disappointment, to trust almost entirely to black and white. ”

“ But, apart from this involuntary licence, most translators are liable to deviate from their original by slight verbal paraphrase in just the same way as transcribers of the fundamental text: in other words, many associations of versions with Greek evidence in support of changes of diction are due to accidental coincidence. Every paraphrastic impulse which affects a transcriber is not less likely to affect a translator, who has a strong additional temptation to indulge the impulse in the fact that he is creating a new set of words, not copying words set one after another before him. ”