Dē textīs linguā latīnā

[Ser]

Since I started to learn Latin, there's a question that has really been bothering me, and much to my own amazement I haven't been able to find an answer for it.

How the hell did all these texts from Cicero, Quintilian, Juvenal, etc. come down to us? It seems amazing to me how little comment you find in Latin textbooks about the more physical part of Latin philology (the actual transmitted texts, however they were transmitted).

Were all these manuscripts copied by medieval people? (How terribly reliable can they be then?) Or are most parchments actually originals from 2000 years ago or so? (Can they actually survive that much time...?)

I don't mean to look for an extensive answer (though it'd be welcome). In fact, a book or two or three where I may read on this would be enough. It just doesn't stop seeming strange to me how people can quote Latin authors without mentioning what manuscript or whatever the particular quotation comes from (though it could be because it's obvious to the readers, and I'm just not familiar enough with Latin philology).

[Shm Jay]

Were all these manuscripts copied by medieval people?

Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism

[Xephyr]

This. Also maybe this.

[Ser]

Thanks! I'll make sure to get around reading these... Call me an über-noob, but it looks like I've been swapping the meanings of "philology" and "textual criticism" for a long time.

And wowww... I can't even start to imagine the huge textual problems with Latin texts considering the way they've been passed. All the misspellings, and grammar mistakes not in the originals (that the original writers wouldn't've accepted), and spurious additions, deletions uncalled for...

[The Peloric Orchid]

Although only tangentially related to the initial post, I learned in a world history class that we got Greek texts from the Arabs, so I would not be surprised if we got some Latin texts from them as well.

[Xephyr]

Although only tangentially related to the initial post, I learned in a world history class that we got Greek texts from the Arabs, so I would not be surprised if we got some Latin texts from them as well.

Homunculus! The Arabs were also in the business of copying manuscripts. Iirc, some of the works of Aristotle were made known to Europe via Arabic translations.

[Ser]

Although only tangentially related to the initial post, I learned in a world history class that we got Greek texts from the Arabs, so I would not be surprised if we got some Latin texts from them as well.

Oh, that's true. Oh dear Lord...

[Xephyr]

Although only tangentially related to the initial post, I learned in a world history class that we got Greek texts from the Arabs, so I would not be surprised if we got some Latin texts from them as well.

Oh, that's true. Oh dear Lord...

Actually, I don't think it's likely at all that we got many Latin texts from the Arabs. The reason it's always the Greek stuff that's brought up is because, for quite a while back in the day, the former Eastern Roman Empire was basically cut off from the Western. I don't really understand the logic of this-- the Adriatic Sea doesn't seem like such a titanic obstacle, but I do know that for a while it was rare for even a literate, intellectual scholar in Latin Christendom to even be able to read Greek. The Latin texts, meanwhile, were never lost.. so to speak.


Of course, I could be wrong about this.

[Salmoneus]

Half-wrong, I think. Never 'lost', per se, but faded out of consciousness to a considerable degree.

I think a lot of our classical sources are actually very reliable, because the copyists were very precise about doing their work exactly. It's one good thing you can say for monks - they do tend to be sticklers. [Quotations, however, even lengthy ones, are pretty hopeless - the idea of exact quotation seems to be quite modern, and classical/medieval authors seem to have felt they could 'quote' what they felt the other person might, as they remember, have seemed to have been driving at maybe]. On the other hand, only a tiny fraction of things have survived at all.

[Ser]

I think a lot of our classical sources are actually very reliable, because the copyists were very precise about doing their work exactly. It's one good thing you can say for monks - they do tend to be sticklers.

Nope, they weren't, which is exactly what textual criticism is about... At least in Old Spanish and Old French texts, it was common practice to translate the original to the dialect or conventions of the scribe (using their contemporary writing conventions, such as stuff like using an r rotunda after ‹b› while older texts used ‹br›, changing the morphology or grammar to that of the scribe...). I wonder how much the monks could've changed the texts to what they thought correct Latin was, or maybe due to influences from their native vernaculars.

[Legion]

Translation is not the same thing as transcription. You know that.

[Ser]

If somebody wrote a tale/song in Francien and somebody copied it in Anglo-Norman, does that count as a translation or transcription? Did they think it was the same language? Did they think they were different languages? Did they think it mattered?

The thing is, if the copy isn't the same as the original while still treating it as a "copy", then what do you call the process of changing it? I thought transcription had to do with transcribing speech (as opposed to transliteration, it concentrates on pronunciation; as opposed to reading, it converts the medium from air to paper; as opposed to translation, it may be more faithful to the original?).

[Legion]

Your original post was about classic texts being transmitted untranslated through medieval copies, now it's about texts composed *in* the middle ages in the vernacular, which is a whole different thing: in this case we often *do* have the original, and when we don't the very notion of original may not apply at all, many such texts having been transmitted through speech before being written down.

[Salmoneus]

Obviously, writers translated many things into languages that weren't Latin. And obviously the shape of the letters has changed [how could the original texts have NOT had r-rotunda? That is, given that they didn't have lower-case letters at all, how can you tell that Cicero wrote <BR> intending the second letter to a thousand years later be written with 'r' and not a rotunda?].

This doesn't seem relevent to our knowledge of Latin.