In the following screen flow video, I introduce a previously unpublished Greek fragment of John Chrysostom's Homily on Maccabees.
 I have recently surveyed around one hundred different papyrological and text-critical studies to see how scholars spell the word used to signify a scribal marking “above the line.” This could refer to a variety of things, including a horizontal stroke placed over abbreviated words and numbers, expunging dots above a letter, a letter serving as a correction or addition above another one on the line, etc. There are two spellings of this commonly used word in the literature: 1) superlinear and 2) supralinear. In the sample of literature I scanned, both spellings occur almost equally. In many cases, the terms are used interchangeably within the same text. It seems to me that it is time we decide on one of the terms.
The prefixes super and supra are both derived from Latin roots meaning “above” and “over,” among other things, and the former is a far more common prefix in the English language (e.g., superstructure, superpower, supernatural, superabundant, etc.). “Superlinear” (and to a far less degree, “supralinear”) is a technical term that is commonly employed in mathematics and physics, and so I would suggest that papyrologists use the term “supralinear” in contradistinction to the former. Of course we all known what both of the terms mean in papyrological contexts, but I think we should aim at terminological uniformity in our grammars, textbooks, papyrological editions, and essays in order to avoid any possible confusion. It might be valuable to trace the origin and development of this term within the discipline and to provide a more precise analysis of the Latin prefixes super and supra vis-à-vis the meaning they are intended to convey. This is a provisional suggestion and I welcome your comments. Just recently, I discovered a missing leaf from l1663—a Gospel lectionary codex housed in Chicago. This leaf, which is kept in the Rare Books and Special Collections of McGill University, has never been identified until now. There is an interesting question as to how it got separated from the larger codex in Chicago, but we know that there is at least one other separated folio in the private collection of E. Krentz. This particular item came into the McGill library during the 1930s, and many readers of this blog will be excited to know that it was purchased from Erik von Scherling. Thus, it is an item from von Scherling's private bulletin Rotulus, where it was no. 2035. There are many more (unpublished) precious gems from the McGill collection, some of which I am currently editing for publication. I am finishing up the edition of this codex leaf, but in the meantime I thought I would introduce it to the readers of this blog through a screen flow video. Enjoy! UPDATE: The following image is a better example of the use of the suspended epsilon in both the new leaf and the Krentz leaf. Notice the near identical letter forms of the first three letters απε as well as the shape and placement of the breathing mark.  One year ago today I migrated over from Blogger to Weebly. I have really enjoyed Weebly's platform and am glad that I made the move. But more exciting than that is the audience engagement. I have been so surprised at the amount of views this blog gets on a daily basis. There are anywhere from 100 to 1,000 views each day from all around the world, and for the last year the numbers are as follows (thanks to Google Analytics): 
168,963 page views from over 129 countries and 3,503 cities. Of the 129 countries, the top 10 are: 
I have put a good bit of time into the posts and have had two, main goals: 1) to bring new information about manuscripts (e.g., via papyrological notes, publications, information about discoveries) and 2) to write quality reviews of academic books. I have managed to review 8 books in the last year, and some of these reviews were published later in journals. Publishers have been willing to send me review copies because of the quality of my reviews, and for those companies (Brill, Walter de Gruyter, Baylor, Baker, Eerdmans, Oxford, T&T Clark, etc.), I am most grateful.
I want to thank all my readers for continuing to read this blog. If there are topics you would like me to address, books you would like me to review, or changes you would like to see made to the blog, please do not hesitate to let me know. I am thinking about some new ways of making the blog better, and I would love your thoughts. I am tentatively thinking of using Screenflow to facilitate tutorials on how to edit papyri, decipher letters in papyri, etc. I have also thought about incorporating a nice forum into the website so that papyrologists, textual critics, classicists and biblical scholars can discuss matters related to texts, archaeology, methodology, contexts, etc., but I don't know if this is needed/desired or not. Anyway, let me know your thoughts either in the comments here or via e-mail. Thanks! |
