Applications
The real usefulness of this kind of analysis will perhaps become
apparent only when its conclusions are applied in the evaluation of
uncorrected error in the text under study.[39] One hardly needs, after all, to
know that
the scribe
had corrected a certain number of transliteration errors to emend
fonode (205) to
foonde,
swrede
(47) to
swerde. But, on the other hand, familiarity with the scribe's
problems with the
ai/ei diphthong—the errors he
corrected
tend to show the omission of one or the other vowel-element—may
cast
some light on a form like
wye 'weigh' (740), which occurs
as
the
C-stave in its line, a position in which Thornton corrected
some twenty-four letter-omissions. Thus, although the OED records this
spelling as a Scots and Northern variant of the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries
(citing only this instance, however), the emendation
weye is
fully justified by the patterns of error shown in Thornton's self-corrections.
The greatest benefit available from the study of the scribe's self-corrections,
in short, is simply familiarity with the scribe's habits of mind and pen.
Familiarity of this kind allows the editor to focus more clearly on the
causes and kinds of error in the text he must deal with and to deal with
them on a more rational basis.
