NB moved from canonical
previous label: quality control
From a user:
Sir:
I have recently downloaded the digital version of The Greek Anthology. In your website the little blurb informs us that it has been produced by a photographic process from W R Paton's edition of 1917 in the Loeb series, which has then been proofread "to a high level of accuracy".
It gives me no pleasure to report that it seems to me, as a mere amateur, not to have been proofread at all in the accepted use of the term.
Greek semicolons are omitted here, there and everywhere. It is by far the most common error - in the sections I have looked it is rare to find a dozen consecutive lines without an example. This is obviously a result of the photographic process (or rather the computer program that converts the photographic image into text), as is the less common substitution of a comma for a full stop, and vice versa.
Grave accents become acute, and vice versa. Some of these changes, such as when an acute accent before an enclitic is changed to a grave, appear to be deliberate, and a result of ignorance.
Accents and diacritical marks appear on their own, unattached to words.
Numerals appear in the middle of words.
One-offs abound. In X 1, who is Leonidot? (The t should be u.) In VII 11, the opening words are obviously not "glukus glukus", which is ungrammatical and doesn't scan - but what should they be? (The first glukus should be o(, the definite article.)
I give an example of VII 13:
- It starts with a capital P on a non-proper noun. It is your custom, apparently, to replace Paton's initial capital letters with a small letter. That is fair enough, except when you don't.
- In line 1, the word neaoidon has had its accent shifted from an acute over the a to a grave over the last o. Either seems acceptable, but isn't your text supposed to be Paton's? This is not proofreading as such, that is to say a correction of accidental errors in the photographs, but a difference of opinion regarding the original 1917 text.
- In line 3, Paton prints the word Hadas with the smooth breathing, as I believe is usual in the Doric dialect, though the rough breathing is possible. The previous point applies. Should you be changing it?
- The same word has a "phantom" (my word) iota. What you have done in the Greek version on your website is to print the tiny subscript iota on its own, not even below the line, between the A and the d, taking up the space of a letter without being one. It takes a sharp eye - in my case a magnifying glass - to distinguish it from a full stop. What on earth? This isn't a Unicode letter, surely. It's double width.
- In the last line, you print ba/skano/s e)ss', taking e)ss' to be enclitic. Paton prints ba/skanos e)/ss'. You are, however, inconsistent in this, and so is Paton, who has it mostly non-enclitic, but enclitic in a couple of places. Gow and Page (1965) are also inconsistent. I can only assume that it is optional, or to put it another way, that nobody knows.
- Also in the last line, the same word e)ss' has become e)ss1'.
- Again in the last line, the word Aida should have a diaeresis over the i. I don't know what to make of this. In some of the sections I have looked at, fully three quarters of the diaereses have disappeared. Perhaps it is defective photography again, but if so that is a huge proportion of errors. I for one wouldn't object too much if they all disappeared, but some and some is distracting and annoying.
You request that any mistakes be reported to you. But there are hundreds. I realise that proofreading is a deadly dull occupation, and the Anthology in parts is long and boring - but really, this is not a high level of accuracy.
Sigh.
Should you want to know the gory details of what I have found so far, please let me know. But I feel it's the very small tip of a very large iceberg.
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