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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Crocodile who wrote (66077)	12/5/2004 9:52:28 AM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Excellent point, my lady croc. I was just telling Justin how I misread the name of the Port Isabelle Tarpons and was horrified. COuld this be? Which it wasn't. Thankfully. I was going to post you next and tell you that there is a real correlation between my stress concert weeks and the incidence of bad dreams. I dread sleeping right now. Two night ago I dreamed that our house, which looked like something Vincent Price would inhabit, had bodies hanging from the rafters and in the attic. And I refused to look up because I was afraid it was the boys. Then a lion left a halfdead squirrel in front of our door and I screamed and ran and felt terrible because I didn't want to deal with it. I think the squirrel is a metaphor for the Allelujah CHorus.

To: Crocodile who wrote (66077)	12/6/2004 11:11:53 PM
From: JF Quinnelly	Respond to of 71178

Ah.. but isn't that a case in point of how easily the meaning of "documents" can be changed by one teensy-weensy typo -- the addition of a "g" where one should not have been? Documents are full of such things, and the more times they are transcribed or transliterated, the more they generally contain, until the original meaning becomes something of a source for discussion and debate. Very true, which is why the error-checking used by the ancient copiests is so remarkable. They used "chiasms", where the text, if properly copied, rendered a visible 'X' on the face of the page. They used sequential progression of lettering, where each succeeding verse began with the next letter in the alphabet sequence. They used rhyme and song. This is apparent in the Greek, but naturally isn't apparent in translations. The number of letters in each line was known. The number of words in each line was known. Since Greek and Hebrew letters also have a number-value, the sum of the letters per line was known. Any deviation from the original, as long as it was copied and not translated, was quickly apparent. For Hebrew scrolls, a copiest could drive a pin through a letter on the outside of the scroll, and predict exactly what letters it would strike as it penetrated the rest of the scroll. The Dead Sea scrolls contain one largely complete Isaiah. This scroll was produced around the first century. The variation of this text from copies of Isaiah one thousand years later is less than 5%, and most of those errors are minor, such as reversing the sequence of two adjacent letters. The ancients took great pains to assure the accuracy of these texts. Why they did is anybody's guess, that they did isn't really an issue.