[B-Greek] Suggestions for TCG 2004
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Nov 27 11:38:33 EST 2003
Just as BMCR seems to allow considerable back-and-forth over reviews, I
have a couple comments on Wieland's response to Stephen Carlson's comments
on the forthcoming TCG 2004.
At 8:24 AM +0100 11/27/03, Wieland Willker wrote:
>Stephen C. Carlson made some suggestions on his "Hypotyposeis" website
>for my forthcoming TCG 2004:
> http://www.uni-bremen.de/~wie/TCG/index.html
>
>He wrote:
>1. While I appreciate Willker's rendering of a suitably qualified
>judgment for each textual variation unit, I keep forgetting what a 1 is
>supposed to mean and what a 2 is supposed to mean. It may be clearer if
>the decision is made more directly intelligible by printing the text or
>the label of the text he favors rather than what appears to an
>arbitrarily assigned number.
>
>2. Willker labels the first line for each textual variation unit
>containing the standard, critical Greek text (the lemma) as BGT, which
>stands for Bibleworks Greek Text. Since I am not a user of the
>Bibleworks software, I don't associate the critical text with
>Bibleworks, so this acronym is rather opaque to me. Various alternatives
>could be used, e.g. NA or N-A for Nestle-Aland, UBS for United Bible
>Societies, or even TXT for txt.
>
>3. The second line, which contains an alternate reading under
>discussion, is often labeled BYZ, for Byzantine or Majority text-type.
>This labeling of the alternate reading as BYZ puts a lot of prominence
>on the (a?) Byzantine reading, even though the Byzantine text-type is
>not quite so important in many critical theories, including my own. To a
>certain extent, all text critical commentaries must assume some
>underlying theory, but, if they are to be useful to a larger group of
>people, their notation should not appear to favor any one particular
>theory. Perhaps a label like ALT1, etc. for first alternative is more
>neutral.
>
>4. Finally, the large one-megabyte PDF files for each gospel could be
>split into two or three smaller pieces to make it easier to quickly look
>up a particular variation.
>-------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Here are my comments:
>1. Basically ok. But "rating: 2" = "alternatives to NA secondary" is not
>too difficult to keep in mind. I think I explained this in the
>introduction. To repeat a reading here would be rather redundant. I
>could change it into "Rating: NA correct" or something. Is this
>important?
To me this is not quite as important, but I think something like "NA27
clearly preferable" would be more immediately indicative.
>2. also agreed, though as a fan of Bibleworks I would like to maintain
>this link. The Bibleworks texts are the best, possibly error-free. If it
>is not too much of a problem I would like to keep "BGT". You only have
>to keep in mind that "BGT" means" NA-27. Btw. why is not everybody using
>Bibleworks? :-)
Wieland, you are within your rights to do whatever you wish with your own
compiled tool, but if you want to use it to advertise Bibleworks, you might
do so more blatantly. I frankly doubt that Bibleworks texts are really
superior or more error-free than the NA27 GNT texts provided by other Bible
software packages. And if you're seriously asking, "Why is not everybody
using Bibleworks?"--and of course you're NOT seriously asking it, as your
emoticon indicates, one reason is clearly that users of other programs find
their current programs best suit their needs.
>3. What has the label "Byz" to do with a textcritical theory? I don't
>see this as a problem. It IS the reading of the Byzantine text, so I
>think the label is ok. It is helpful to see at a glance where the
>Byzantine text deviates from NA. I understand though what you mean, it
>is, that it is often NOT the Byz text ALONE that supports a reading.
So why not adopt Stephen's alternative or something like it?
>4. Possible. Disadvantage is that if you search for something you have
>to check several files. Probably I HAVE to do it sooner or later because
>the files get bigger and bigger.
The files are certainly extremely unwieldy when viewed in Adobe Reader and
it takes quite a while even to load them. On the other hand, the latest
version of the "Preview" program in Mac OS X 10.3 is fast loading, quickly
searchable and navigable, even prints a lot faster and easier than Adobe
Reader. Moreover, if Wieland would divulge the password with which he
protects the file, it would be very easy to copy and paste the contents of
the whole PDF file into a word-processor file that could be handled much
more easily.
>What do you all think? You can convince me, if the feedback is uni sono.
>Other comments?
I hope that there may be some other comments, because I think that
Wieland's work is very useful and could be made even more useful if
Stephen's suggestions were to be adopted.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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