I am getting ready to speak to the Mommsen Society in Germany next week
and I would like to make the point that linguistic annotation is not new
-- rather, it is so entrenched in our scholarship that we have forgotten
the extent to which we embed it in our work.
I would like to use an edition of Aeschylus as an example and to show
first a 19th century edition and then show the text as it might have
appeared if we had whatever text Aeschylus initially produced (however
he produced it and assuming he had a single stable text).
I am not an expert in the writing of 5th century Athens and assume we
derive virtually all of our understanding from epigraphic data but there
I am certainly no expert.
To get a closer approximation of what Aeschylus might have produced I
would do the following:
* convert all etas and omegas to epsilons and omicrons
* remove all accents
* remove all punctuation
* remove all distinction between upper and lower case
Any suggestions to correct or improve that?
Greg
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