Friday, October 05, 2007

I'm curious to know if anyone can recommend resources (books, articles, web sites, whatever) on matters of punctuation, sentence/paragraph delineation, and orthography as they pertain to printed editions of the Greek New Testament.

If you ever compare editions of the Greek NT, you'll see these differences sticking out like sore thumbs. The words themselves (the order of the stream of letters) may not differ, but the other stuff does. Editions differ on paragraph placement, how to break up paragraphs (i.e. NA27's use of sub-paragraphs* within paragraphs?), sentence delineation, treatment of divine names (only upper-cased when also a proper name? or all upper-cased?), and orthographical issues.

The only treatment of orthography of an edition of the Greek New Testament that I know of (offhand) is in Westcott & Hort's appendix volume to their edition, pp. 148-179. I can't say I've read much on the other stuff (outside of discourse analysis/grammar approaches to determining textual units) and, frankly, it seems like more of an art than a science when you actually examine an edition.

Anyone have any references for such things? I can get to some decent libraries if I need to (Trinity Western University or the Vancouver School of Theology, for example).

Thanks!

Update (2007-10-05): There's also Westcott & Hort's introduction volume (actually, the intro & appendix are in the same print volume, though the page numbering starts again for the appendix — at least in my edition, dated 1896). Intro part 4, pp. 288-324 (§§375-425) cover W&H's approach on much of this material. §§393-404 cover orthography; §§405-416 cover breathings, accents and the like; §§417-423 cover punctuation and textual division as well as titles of books. Zounds! Now that's detail. But that's the only place I've found this sort of information. The NA27 preface/intro has no such information; Maurice Robinson's 2005 Byzantine (printed edition) has about a page. R.V.G. Tasker has about two sentences in the intro to his Greek New Testament being the text translated in The New English Bible (he basically says the his Greek follows the NEB NT English practice). Does anyone else have any other references?


* If you ever wondered why there are some longer white space breaks in portions of paragraphs (say, 1/4 to 1/2 inch wide like the space before Jn 1.18 in this screen shot) ... then you've found subparagraph breaks in the NA27. I didn't know about them myself until I asked a contact at the German Bible Society about them while I was working on creating the Logos Bible Software edition of the NA27 with critical apparatus markers found in the SESB. And yes, the Logos editions of NA27 do include visual subparagraph breaks in the text (as well as the paragraphing, casing, etc. of the printed edition).

 

Post Author: rico
Friday, October 05, 2007 4:18:06 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 

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