[INDOLOGY] Devanagari v and b in manuscripts from Kashmir

[Charles Li]

> The author is Dr Charles Li.

That's me!

Saktumiva is part of an ongoing effort to produce critical editions 
starting from diplomatically* transcribing manuscripts. Then, at the 
collation stage, common orthographic variants are filtered out 
automatically — this can be configured depending on what you want to see 
in your apparatus. The idea is to keep as much information intact as 
possible, so that later scholars can reproduce the work and easily 
critically evaluate the decisions that went into it.

Here is a shameless plug for a text that I recently edited in this way, 
the story of King Śibi in the /Vahnipurāṇa/:

    https://alt.cardiffuniversitypress.org/articles/10.18573/alt.58

The article is accompanied by a digital edition, here:

    https://tst-project.github.io/siberupakhyana

The digital edition includes diplomatic transcriptions of every witness, 
alignments of every verse in the text, and images of the manuscripts or 
printed books that are transcribed, where possible. The idea is that the 
work should be reproducible, like "Real Science" — following a series of 
steps, you should be able to either reproduce that text that I've 
critically edited, or else make different decisions that will give you a 
different text. (I imagine I'm not the only person who has struggled 
with interpreting a critical text, only to spend ages tracking down the 
sources and finally discovering that the editor just misread an akṣara.) 
Making all of the material available will also hopefully make it easier 
for scholars to re-use the work in the future, whether for simple text 
mining, or analyzing text reuse, or for creating new critical texts.

Best,

Charles

*As the foregoing conversation demonstrates, transcription is inherently 
an interpretive act, and scholarly practice with respect to diplomacy 
varies widely. But even mechanical reproduction is inherently 
interpretive — for example, colour calibration in photography, and this 
famous case of photocopier error: 
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2015/0823_video_slides_xerox_talk_froscon


On 2023-03-26 01:10, Dominik Wujastyk via INDOLOGY wrote:
> The author is Dr Charles Li. There's more information at the Github 
> site: https://github.com/chchch/upama .
> See also,
>
>   * Reconstructing a Sanskrit text
>     <https://chchch.github.io/sanskrit-alignment/docs/index.html>
>   * For further discussion of the methodology behind Saktumiva, see Li
>     2017 <https://www.sidestone.com/bookviewer/9789088904837>: 305-310
>     and Li 2018
>     <https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1810/284085/limits_of_the_real.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y>,
>     ch.4.
>  *
>     Li, C. (2022) “Helayo: Reconstructing Sanskrit Texts from
>     Manuscript Witnesses,” Journal of Open Source Software. /The Open
>     Journal/ 7: 4022. DOI <http://doi.org/10.21105/joss.04022>
>
> Best,
> Dominik
>
> On Sat, 25 Mar 2023 at 17:40, Harry Spier <vasishtha.spier at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>
>     Dominik,
>     Could you tell us a little more about saktumIva (saktumiva.org
>     <http://saktumiva.org>).  The website tells us what it does, but I
>     couldn't find a page that gave some history of it, who its
>     principals were etc.
>     *Saktumiva* is a platform for producing and publishing critical
>     editions of Sanskrit texts. Users can produce transcriptions of
>     documents, such as manuscripts or printed editions, and then
>     automatically collate them to produce an apparatus of variants.
>
>     Thanks,
>     Harry Spier
>
>
>     On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 7:20 PM Dominik Wujastyk
>     <wujastyk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>         Quite.  In the Suśruta Project
>         <https://saktumiva.org/wiki/wujastyk/susrutasamhita/start>'s
>         edition we've gone with geminated consonants (karmma, karttā)
>         and some other odd sandhi choices (evaṅ guṇam) because they
>         are sanctioned by Pāṇini.  It's going to make our edition a
>         bit odd for readers who are used to smoothed-out Sanskrit. 
>         But it's grammatically correct.  And that's another editorial
>         assumption: we assume that our author(s) know grammar.  That
>         can also be tricky, if we think there are maybe some
>         dialectical features appearing.  Luckily, the SS is a good
>         example of classical Sanskrit.  Separating error from dialect
>         or language drift, the BHS problem, is extra challenging.
>
>         Best,
>         Dominik
>
>         On Fri, 24 Mar 2023 at 21:39, Harry Spier
>         <vasishtha.spier at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>             Point taken Dominik. You wrote:
>
>                  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.
>
>
>             I think another reason, in addition to all the reasons you
>             gave for what you suggest. I.e.  "first is the diplomatic
>             transcription"  and only then to create a "normalized"
>             file, is that deciding whats normal is sometimes a
>             judgement call . There may be more than one norm. For example:
>             Monier-Williams dictionary has pattra and chattra but
>             Apte's dictionary has patra and chatra .
>
>             Harry Spier
>
>
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