[INDOLOGY] Devanagari v and b in manuscripts from Kashmir

[Dominik Wujastyk]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2023 at 18:45, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> So what does that mean?
> 1) The scribe was a professional scribe who didn't know sanskrit but was
> just copying existing errors or copying a difficult to read manuscript.?
> or
> 2) It wasn't considered important  by the scholarly/religeous clients that
> he conflated v and b because they were used to that and in any case they
> knew sanskrit so it wasn't important to them?
> or
> 3) Something else?
>

All good questions, questions that are hard to study without a faithful
(not normalized) transcription.  For example, if you transcribe
diplomatically, you can produce a ratio of scribal bagalās to vagalās, and
that ratio might help with future manuscripts or if it turns out to be
unique to the scribe, it could be an identifier for other MSS copied by the
same person.

I'm not sure that a point I've been making all along has been sufficiently
noticed.  One has *two* files.  The first is the diplomatic transcription
(karmma, vindu, adhiṣṭāna).  The second is whatever one wants it to be, but
it's interpretative or normalized.  It can be benevolent, it can be a
critical edition, etc. etc.   Getting from file Diplomatic to file
Normalized may be partly algorithmic, but will probably be mostly manual.

Dominik
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