[INDOLOGY] Whitney and doubling of "ch"

[Harry Spier]

Thank you to all the learned voices for this delightful discussion of what
I naively thought was a simple question. And thank you to Arlo Griffiths
who gave a concrete example of the dangers of normalizing editions.  He
wrote:
* . . .* I imagine that, Max Müller and his successors in editing Vedic
texts actually encountered the same spelling features in the mss. they used
for editing the RV and other Vedic texts, as those that were found by other
scholars working on classical Sanskrit texts from the same manuscript
catchment areas, but that Vedic texts were edited with a lesser tendency to
normalize manuscript spellings. And the result was that their editorial
choices took a life of their own in subsequent Vedic scholarship as it got
ever more detached in the course of the 20th century from the manuscript
basis of the textual corpus to which this field of scholarship is devoted.

To my mind this gives further weight to Dominik Wujastyk's recommendation
in a recent discussion about manuscript transcription standards to produce
a diplomatic transcription along with  an edited/normalized transcription.

I think the problem with normalizing texts was brought up on this list over
25 years ago in a discussion abour critical editions.

Harry Spier
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