Recent Theories of Textual Criticism

Greg, W. W.

doi:10.1086/387920

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Yet, some have argued that the prevalence of root bifurcation could be an explainable feature of manuscript transmission of texts as it reached us. Tentative explanations include combinatorial estimations of the proportion of root bifurcation for a given number of witnesses, under the assumption that all configurations are equally likely [19,17,20], or consider the effects of decimation (i.e., manuscript loss) [21], for instance by applying a uniform loss probability to static preexisting trees [10] or by calculating a node specific loss probability to simulated trees [22]. Even if it generated little follow-ups, there have also been rare attempts of using birth and death process for exploring the dynamics of manuscript transmission [23,24].…”

Section: D)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Lost Manuscripts and Extinct Texts: A Dynamic Model of Cultural Transmission

Camps¹,

Randon‐Furling²

2022

Preprint

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How did written works evolve, disappear or survive down through the ages? In this paper, we propose a unified, formal framework for two fundamental questions in the study of the transmission of texts: how much was lost or preserved from all works of the past, and why do their genealogies (their "phylogenetic trees") present the very peculiar shapes that we observe or, more precisely, reconstruct? We argue here that these questions share similarities to those encountered in evolutionary biology, and can be described in terms of "genetic" drift and "natural" selection. Through agent-based models, we show that such properties as have been observed by philologists since the 1800s can be simulated, and confronted to data gathered for ancient and medieval texts across Europe, in order to obtain plausible estimations of the number of works and manuscripts that existed and were lost.

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Section: D)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Lost Manuscripts and Extinct Texts: A Dynamic Model of Cultural Transmission

Camps¹,

Randon‐Furling²

2022

Preprint

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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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“…28 This "paradox" was first, and with exceptional effectiveness, put forward inBédier 1928. The literature on Bedier's paradox is huge; seeGreg 1931;Castellani 1954;Alberti 1979;Timpanaro 1985; Appendice C (with a review of previous proposals of "explanation" of the paradox), Reeve 1986; Hoenen & Eger 2017; all with a bibliography. 29 See Flight 1990; Hoenen & Eger 2017.…”

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confidence: 99%