Lachmann, Bédier and the Bipartite Stemma : Towards a Responsible Application of the Common-Error Method

Grier, James

doi:10.3406/rht.1989.1332

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…More realistically, any modern editor may choose among one of those approaches depending on his/her material and circumstances. Nevertheless, the argument has ever since stimulated much research repeatedly including mathematical argumentation, see for instance, Greg (1931), Maas (1937), Fourquet (1946), Whitehead (1951), Pasquali (1952), Castellani (1957, Hering (1967), Kleinlogel (1968), Weitzman (1982), Weitzman (1987), Grier (1989), Haugen (2002), Timpanaro (2005), Haugen (2010), Haugen (2015), Hoenen (2016). Maas argued that the number of stemmata with a root bifurcation among all possible stemmata which can be reconstructed (thus regarding stemma generation apriori as a random process) would be naturally high.…”

Section: Collection Root Bifurcations Root Tri-or Multifurcationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Many Stemmata with Root Degree k?

Hoenen

Eger

Gehrke³

2017

Proceedings of the 15th Meeting on the Mathematics of Language

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We are investigating parts of the mathematical foundations of stemmatology, the science reconstructing the copying history of manuscripts. After Joseph Bédier in 1928 got suspicious about large amounts of root bifurcations he found in reconstructed stemmata, Paul Maas replied in 1937 using a mathematical argument that the proportion of root bifurcating stemmata among all possible stemmata is so large that one should not become suspicious to find them abundant. While Maas' argument was based on one example with a tradition of three surviving manuscripts, we show in this paper that for the whole class of trees corresponding to Maasian reconstructed stemmata and likewise for the class of trees corresponding to complete historical manuscript genealogies, root bifurcations are apriori the most expectable root degree type. We do this by providing a combinatorial formula for the numbers of possible so-called Greg trees according to their root degree (Flight, 1990). Additionally, for complete historical manuscript trees (regardless of loss), which coincide mathematically with rooted labeled trees, we provide formulas for root degrees and derive the asymptotic degree distribution. We find that root bifurcations are extremely numerous in both kinds of trees. Therefore, while previously other studies have shown that root bifurcations are expectable for true stemmata, we enhance this finding to all three philologically relevant types of trees discussed in breadth until today.

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Section: Collection Root Bifurcations Root Tri-or Multifurcationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Many Stemmata with Root Degree k?

Hoenen

Eger

Gehrke³

2017

Proceedings of the 15th Meeting on the Mathematics of Language

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“…One-leg branchings usually formalise the presence of a recension.27 SeeFourquet 1948, 86-89;Grier 1988; Chiesa 2020. 28 This "paradox" was first, and with exceptional effectiveness, put forward inBédier 1928.…”

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Acerbi

2023

Vatican Libr. Rev.

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Copystree

2018

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The reconstruction of phylogenies of cultural artefacts represents an open problem that mixes theoretical and computational challenges. Existing benchmarks rely on simulated phylogenies, where hypotheses on the underlying evolutionary mechanisms are unavoidable, or on real data phylogenies, for which no true evolutionary history is known. Here we introduce a web-based game, Copystree, where users create phylogenies of manuscripts through successive copying actions in a fully monitored setup. While players enjoy the experience, Copystree allows to build artificial phylogenies whose evolutionary processes do not obey any predefined theoretical mechanisms, being generated instead with the unpredictability of human creativity. We present the analysis of the data gathered during the first set of experiments and use the artificial phylogenies gathered for a first test of existing phylogenetic algorithms.

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Lachmann, Bédier and the Bipartite Stemma : Towards a Responsible Application of the Common-Error Method

Cited by 4 publications

References 2 publications

How Many Stemmata with Root Degree k?

How Many Stemmata with Root Degree k?

Editing Technical Texts

Copystree

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