Re: orthography and pronunciation

Patrick Dunn scripsit:

> > We don't really know how long CDs will last.  But it hardly matters: the point
> > is that whatever is in active use will get copied and transcribed over and over.
>
> Whoah.  What you describe *there* is an oral,k not a written, culture.
> Are we now an oral culture?  *staggers*  SAeriously.
We are and always have been an oral culture.  Books help maintain it, of course.
But why are you surprised by the notion of copying and transcription?
That's just what happens in all manuscript traditions: no material lasts
forever.  We have many literary works (the Bible, all the Greek and Roman
and Sanskrit classics) which are much older than the earliest surviving
manuscripts.

Textual criticism is not a thing of the past either.  The published
versions of Joyce's _Ulysses_ now available still have hundreds of errors,
though far better than the original printings (favorite error: plot aborts
on page 4 when Buck Mulligan goes "over the side" of the martello tower
instead of "over to the side"!).  As for the textual criticism of
_Finnegans Wake_, it is in its infancy.

It's just that now the transcription and copying can be done on a vast
scale and millions of times faster and cheaper than before.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
        --Douglas Hofstadter