On Thu, 16 Mar 2023 at 18:45, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY < [email protected]> wrote:
> So what does that mean? > 1) The scribe was a professional scribe who didn't know sanskrit but was > just copying existing errors or copying a difficult to read manuscript.? > or > 2) It wasn't considered important by the scholarly/religeous clients that > he conflated v and b because they were used to that and in any case they > knew sanskrit so it wasn't important to them? > or > 3) Something else? > All good questions, questions that are hard to study without a faithful (not normalized) transcription. For example, if you transcribe diplomatically, you can produce a ratio of scribal bagalās to vagalās, and that ratio might help with future manuscripts or if it turns out to be unique to the scribe, it could be an identifier for other MSS copied by the same person. I'm not sure that a point I've been making all along has been sufficiently noticed. One has *two* files. The first is the diplomatic transcription (karmma, vindu, adhiṣṭāna). The second is whatever one wants it to be, but it's interpretative or normalized. It can be benevolent, it can be a critical edition, etc. etc. Getting from file Diplomatic to file Normalized may be partly algorithmic, but will probably be mostly manual. Dominik
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