17 November, 2006

Phrase of the Week

I'm currently reading Misquoting Jesus, a book about textural criticism of the New Testament. The author, Bret Ehrman, describes how changes were made to the text during the years between them originally having been written and the modern era. Way back in the days before Gutenberg invented printing, manuscripts were copied by hand, often imperfectly, and Ehrman describes one type of copying error:

One common type of mistake in Greek manuscripts occurred when two lines of the text being copied ended with the same letters or the same words. A scribe might copy the first line of text, and then when his eye went back to the page, it might pick up on the same words on the next line, instead of the line he had just copied? he would continue copying from there and, as a result, leave out the intervening words and/or lines. This kind of mistake is called periblepsis (an "eyeskip") occasioned by homoeoteleuton (the "same endings").

And so this week's phrase is "periblepsis pariblepsis occasioned by homoeoteleuton".

2 comments:

JonK said...

I think the word is parablepsis, not periblepsis. Quite different meanings!

Skip said...

Thanks for pointing out the typo.