Talk:Lectio difficilior potior

non sequitur

"scribes tended to "correct" harder readings, and thus cut off the stream of transmission, so that earlier manuscripts would have the harder readings and later ones would not; hence they would not see the corollary principle as being a very important one for bringing us closer to the original form of the text." The simple restatement of Robinson's corollary does not lead to finding it "unimportant", whatever "unimportant" might mean in this context. I have left it unedited. --Wetman 20:05, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Carrington

I know this was simply meant to illustrate a point, but the correct spelling has nearly 4 times as many hits as the incorrect one. A better example might be found.

That depends whether you treat it as a string or not. Macphysto (talk) 21:05, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Noting the above complaints about the Carrington section, and having taken the bitter experience for myself of it having interrupted what would have otherwise been scholarly reading, seeing that it had not even implied references to real scholarship, let alone direct ones, and seeing that it reeked of cheesy original research that was dubious at best, and seeming more like an interruption by a superfluous example, though recognizing that it was part of the nostalgic first page edit, yet rejecting that nostalgia as of any merit, seeing how it dims the otherwise shining examples of Wikipedia scholarship that followed, I hereby propose to myself to immediately delete that section, pending reversal by any debate, which I do not seriously anticipate. Samuel Erau (talk) 23:57, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

"Eclectic text"

The article has had a red link to "eclectic text" for quite a while. Is this a term of art in the field of textual criticism, or would it be better to link to wikt:eclectic instead? --SoledadKabocha (talk) 06:07, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Some searching suggests that yes, "eclectic" does have a special meaning in relation to textual criticism, but most of those discussions are specifically about the Bible. At this point I see no clear reason to remove the link or to retarget it to Wiktionary; however, I feel it might be better to have something like "Eclectic (textual criticism)" as the canonical name of a future article on the term, with "eclectic text" as a redirect. --SoledadKabocha (talk) 19:39, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

Curious sentence

"difficult readings created by individual scribes do not tend to perpetuate in any significant degree within transmissional history".

Now, that is a curious use of "perpetuate." This could be said far more clearly--"survive" might be better than "perpetuate", but I can't access the source, so I'm not confident about rephrasing the sentence. (Yes, I understand the irony inherent in saying "this could be said more clearly" in this article of all places:D.) Snowgrouse (talk) 13:18, 25 October 2023 (UTC)