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June 25, 2020
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Thank you for giving us the webinar. It was a great and fascinating topic. One thing that stuck out, as you were talking about p45 of the Gospel of Mark, was why didn’t the scribes use punctuations, accent marks, or breathing marks in the Greek manuscripts? Was it to save room on the page due to Papyrus paper being not accessible as much?
Yeah, actually it’s a stranger reason. Such things were invented and widely used later.
So then why did the scribes have continuous lines of letters without spacing the words apart? Why did they make it hard to read? It would be logical if they would space the words out to make it to easier to read.
They didn’t think they were making it hard to read. It’s just how everyone wrote back then. What seems logical once you live in a world where things are improved, it always seems weird that no one thought of that before….
Very interesting!!! Thank you.
Sorry to cut in. The same question has been haunting me for a while.
Today, in modern Japanese, when ideograms are used in writing, even if they are placed in a continuum, the document is easy to read.
Linear B samples have much space between phrases, probably for this reason.
Ancient Greek after Linear B is just a left-to-right language, then sometimes right-to-left or words are placed in alternate rows. The continuum is thought to be “hard” to read, as our brain is not much different from the brain of ancient Greeks. But the “script” is also thought to be read aloud, and so people would read the document before speaking. Also, some kind of imaginative and creating reading would occur. The reader would embellish the document while browsing the words.
Phonetics vs ideograms seems the answer to the question.
And I have the feeling that pottery vs papyri could be also a parameter in the equation.
P.S.
With a computerized textual analysis in the “scriptio continua” case it could be possible, on a lengthy document, check whether the copyist could also read Greek and not only write or copy the letters by analyzing the density of spaces between the letters themselves.
Guess the answer was no.
If you got the originals, how would you recognize them?
Even imagining a series of copies converging in time to some point (heard NT Wright using this term), the original, nobody could exclude singularity in the pattern.
Unless presupposing a law of continuum, some sort of platonism.
If writings do live in a special world: perfect, non-mental, non-spatial, non-temporal, and unborn, every piece of literature would be discovered, not created.
Then collecting royalties would be a theft.