And the word of the day is: Homoioteleuton (ho-mee-oh-te-loot’-on)
Roughly, “same ending”. A homoioteleuton is two lines of text in which the ending is the same. For example:
1 The very tall man was walking
2 down the well-lit city street
3 where the woman was talking
4 to a little girl.
During the copying of manuscripts, this can result in recognizable kind of copying error: Skipping a section of the text.
In this example, if you’re copying the text, it would be easy to skip lines 2 & 3. You copy line 1, and when your eyes go back to the page, you accidentally go back to the end of line 3 instead of the end of line 1. You end up with “The very tall man was walking to a little girl.”
This can be very useful to textual critics, trying to figure out which manuscript has the original reading. If you have two manuscripts (A and B), and A reads 1,4 while B reads 1,2,3,4, you can be pretty sure what happened. “Oh,” you say, “the scribe skipped those lines because of the similar ending homoioteleuton.”
Tags: Word of the Day
Entries (RSS)
Hmmm…okay…I take back my tongue-in-cheek comment about the previous word of the day…
I actually DO think your “theology word of the day” posts are informative, and thus worthy of your blog…
…you have my permission to carry on…
I’m not sure how often I’ll do these. It should probably be called “Theology Word of the Oh-look-Tim-found-another-fun-word-to-talk-about.”