Chapter 6 The Various Scribal Habits Behind Substitutions
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Starting with Colwell, singular readings have been studied as a way to catalogue scribal habits in creating textual variants. One type of copying error is substitution—replacing one word with another. Especially those substitutions that result in a different lexical item provide a rich study ground for scribal habits and illustrate the remarkable capability of scribes to make gross errors. This paper discusses four factors that appear to contribute to the creation of substitutions: (1) harmonization, (2) phonetical likeness, (3) the influence of a similar ‘word image’, and (4), the influence of the copyist’s mental lexicon.