[B-Greek] B-Greek Year End Awards
John Sanders
john.franklin.sanders at gmail.com
Tue Jan 5 01:52:01 EST 2010
In reference to THE HAWKEYE PIERCE AWARD FOR THE
ORTHOGRAPHIC REFORM LEAST LIKELY TO
TAKE PLACE BECAUSE IT MAKES TOO MUCH SENSE:
Sarah Madden, for suggesting that we retain rough breathings
but get rid of smooth readings.
If I may, I would like to come to the support of Aristophanes of Byzantium.
I fear many may not understand the significance of using two symbols for
the aspirate (one for smooth breathing and one for rough breathing). At one
time, many years ago, I also thought along similar lines as they who wish to
eliminate the redundant symbol, but my work requirements changed that for
me.
When I was a young engineer I was required to create and maintain lists in
which the items would be in one of two states, either the “is” state or the
“not is” state: either it would be aspirated or it would not be, it would
be completed or it would not be, it would contain X or it would not, etc. I
knew that only one symbol was required to list these items and so I
constructed my lists accordingly, using a symbol to record the “is” state
and no symbol to record the “not is” state.
Instead of the one problem that I thought would be involved in these lists,
I had two problems to deal with: the expected problem which I will label as
mis-identification, that is where one identifies the “is” state as “not is”
and vice versa; and the unexpected problem which I will label as
non-identification, that is for what ever reason one does not label the
state one way or the other. Assuming one has the knowledge to recognize the
“is” state from the “not is” state, the problem of mis-identification is
minimal, especially compared to the problem of non-identification. But non
–identification could not be distinguished from the “not is” state. This
created a quality control problem. Although theoretically not necessary, I
found that using two symbols, one for the “is” state and one for the “not
is” state improved the quality of my lists immeasurably.
So when I see a list of words with the both the rough breathing and smooth
breathing marks, lists such as the Iliad, etc., then I have much more
confidence in their accuracy than if they only had one such mark.
> --
> John Sanders
> Suzhou, China
>
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