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Re: corrupt vulgate

   Date: 	Tue, 4 Jan 1994 17:30:22 -0700
   From: "Sterling G. Bjorndahl" <bjorndahl@augustana.ab.ca>
   X-Vms-Mail-To: UU%"nt-greek@virginia.edu"

   You call that application "useful"?  I call it trivial.  I doubt, from
   what I have read so far of your postings, that you are an academic--at
   least not one in any area of the humanities.  I'm not just name calling
   here.  Academics expect other academics to hold to certain standards of
   reliability.  Those who don't hold to them get shot down.  

Absolutely.  I'm not an academic in the humanities.  But the attitude
here that the only use of the Vulgate must be an academic one is in
error.  There are many uses; the current CCAT distribution channel
leaves out many non-academic uses.

One other use for public texts.  A friend (he's a linguistics PhD
student) and I were discussing the origin of the hanged/hung
distinction in English.  (Both are the past tense of `hang'; `hanged'
refers to capital punishment and `hung' refers to other kings of
hanging.)  My friend's thought was that the distinction was invented
in the nineteenth century along with many other English grammatical
"rules".  I suspected that it was much older.  So, I got my online
Shakespeare and checked.  Lo and behold, the distinction is quite
clear; out of the entire Shakespearean corpus there were three
exceptions--two of which might have been metaphorical uses and not
really exceptions at all.

This was useful research (albeit of small importance) that would not
have been affected if the "complete works of shakespeare" I had turned
out to omit Act IV of King Lear.  

   Michael, I dare you to try to move this discussion to a more appropriate
   forum, e.g., the "corpora" discussion which specializes in text corpora. 
   I bet you a dollar that you'd be laughed off the net and flamed to a
   crisp.  Your position is untenable.

My position is that inaccurate and faulty texts have uses--not
necessarily academic uses, but certainly uses of social importance.

   To do otherwise is to engage in offensively anti-social and
   anti-academic behaviour.  

Why the assumption that the only interest in the Vulgate is academic?


	-mib
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