On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 7:05 PM, James Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
Of course not -- one cannot talk about "correctness" when something is 1) intended to be readable by today's audience, and 2) has been transcribed into something that is a small subset of what was available to publishers even by the 1700s 3) the chosen subset is primarily dictated by what can be easily input from a standard IBM chicklet keyboard and more-or-less OCR'ed by standard OCR software 4) a subset of punctuation and simplified punctuation rules have been adopted in practice which differ somewhat from that which obviously the author and publisher put in their books.
One can always talk about correctness; it comes in many different levels and varieties. Just because the New Testament was written in Greek, doesn't mean we can't call an English translation wrong where the Gospel of John starts: "Send David all your money in small unmarked bills." I rather like that translation, but objectively speaking, it doesn't represent the original Greek in any way, shape or form. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.