Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Tigran Aivazian <tigran AT bibles.org.uk>]

I wanted to add that another value of making such comparison (and 
recording the differences in the footnotes as a complete collation) is to 
verify my text, i.e. confirm that it is "at least as good" as Leningrad 
and Aleppo Codices, i.e. has no unexpected blunders anywhere.

Several people have done such verification in the past and they believe my 
text to be "better" than Leningrad Codex, but I personally have NOT yet
confirmed it and after their results I did find a couple of "blunders" in 
my text so clearly this sort of verification still MUST be performed to
make 100% sure.

So, I asked one of my students to look closely at creating a collation of 
differences with Aleppo Codex and I will personally look into collating 
Leningrad Codex (taking WTT text as a base) as soon as my spare time 
permits.

Kirk, btw, this means that I will have to raise the priority of the task 
of bringing up WLC module up to date with my latest Bible typesetting 
engine for the source export function to produce the same format (and thus 
be easily analyzed by a script) In other words, I will have to do it 
sooner than later :)

Shalom
Tigran

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Tigran Aivazian wrote:

> Greetings Peter,
>
> On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Peter Kirk wrote:
> > You ignore the best evidence - apparently Aleppo as well in the evidence 
> > you quoted - and concentrate on differences between late derivative copies 
> > of that best evidence.
>
> No, that is not quite true, although it is right to say that what I actually 
> _quoted_ (i.e. listed) indeed contained only the printed editions. But the 
> data I examine is based on the collation (sometimes complete!) of the SEVENTY 
> ancient manuscripts, some of which (e.g. Or. 4445 and Codex Beth of the 
> Prophets) much more ancient than either Leningrad and Aleppo Codices.
>
> However, for the lack of space on a page (as I construct an edition to be 
> read every day and not to sit on a shelf as an Encyclopaedia) I do not 
> actually list individual manuscripts (though I could do that, in a separate 
> edition that will be designed for that very purpose, to record _detailed_ 
> data of this sort) and only record printed editions, but only _according_ to 
> the way they agree with those ancient manuscripts.
>
> > I think that your work will still be in progress and far from complete 
> > until it includes all variations in the Leningrad and Aleppo texts.
>
> There is nothing stopping some volunteer (you and anyone are welcome to join 
> :) to include all such variations. I will gladly accept the patches.
> Now, as I said, there is no space on a page to record all the data from all 
> those 70 manuscripts. But, okay, Leningrad and Aleppo are special enough to 
> make an exception for these two.
>
> Btw, speaking of Leningrad Codex, it is actually on my list of things TODO to 
> generate the differences automatically as I can use Kirk Lowery's electronic 
> text I have (which I converted to Tiqwah encoding and also typeset as PDF 
> available at http://www.bibles.org.uk/pdf/bibles/Hebrew). So, at least for 
> Leningrad Codex the task is not that hard and should be doable in the near 
> future. (everyone who reads this can consider it a "call for volunteers" --- 
> the environment for work is already set up and an ssh account will be 
> provided whereby you can help with the task Peter mentioned)
>
> As for Aleppo, I have seen electronic (meaning machine-readable, not just 
> scanned facsimiles) versions thereof (one even produced by one of my students 
> :) but I am not sure if they are 100% reliable, so to include all variants 
> from Aleppo may be a lot more work...
>
> In summary, thank you Peter for your opinion on my work --- it is 
> constructive and lead me to some ideas for future work that are quite 
> reasonable and should be doable.
>
> Shalom
> Tigran
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew