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Palaeography
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== Application == Palaeography is an essential skill for many [[historian]]s, [[semioticians]] and [[philology|philologists]], as it addresses a suite of interrelated lines of inquiry. First, since the style of an [[alphabet]], [[grapheme]] or [[sign system]] set within a register in each given dialect and language has evolved constantly, it is necessary to know how to decipher its individual substantive, occurrence make-up and constituency. For example, assessing its characters and typology as they existed in various places, times and locations. In addition, for hand-written texts, [[scribe]]s often use many [[scribal abbreviation|abbreviations]], and annotations so as to functionally aid speed, efficiency and ease of writing and in some registers to importantly save invaluable space of the medium. Hence, the specialist-palaeographer, philologist and semiotician must know how to, in the broadest sense, interpret, comprehend and understand them. Knowledge of individual [[letterforms]], [[typographic ligature]]s, signs, [[Linguistic typology|typology]], [[fonts]], graphemes, [[hieroglyphics]], and signification forms in general, subsuming [[punctuation]], [[syntagm]] and [[proxemics]], abbreviations and annotations; enables the palaeographer to read, comprehend and then to understand the text and/or the relationship and hierarchy between texts in suite. The palaeographer, philologist and semiotician must first determine language, then dialect and then the register, function and purpose of the text. That is, one must by necessity become expert in the formation, historicity and evolution of these languages and signification communities, and material [[communication events]]. Secondly, the historical usages of various styles of handwriting, common writing customs, and scribal or [[notary|notarial]] abbreviations, annotations conventions, [[annexure]]s, [[addenda]] and specifics of printed typology, syntagm and proxemics must be assessed as a collective undertaking. Philological knowledge of the register, language, vocabulary, and grammar generally used at a given time, place and circumstance may assist palaeographers to identify a hierarchy of texts in a suite through discourse analysis, determining the [[provenance]] of texts, identifying [[forgeries]], [[interpolation]]s and [[recension]]s with precision; eliciting a professional authenticity in documentation, textual and manuscript evaluation with view to producing a [[critical edition]] if required and a critical assessment of a given [[discourse event]] as rendered and set in a materiality or medium. Knowledge of [[writing material]]s and discourse material production systems is foundational to the study of handwriting and printing events and to the identification of the periods in which a document or manuscript may have been produced.<ref name=fn_3>Robert P. Gwinn, "Paleography" in the [[Encyclopædia Britannica]], [[Micropædia]], Vol. IX, 1986, p. 78.</ref> An important goal may be to assign the text a date and a place of origin, or determining which translations of a text are produced from which specific document or manuscript. This is why the palaeographer and attendant semiologists and philologists must take into account the style, substance and formation of the text, document and manuscript and the handwriting style and printed typology, grapheme typos and lexical and signification system(s) employed.<ref name=fn_4>Fernando De Lasala, ''Exercise of Latin Paleography'' ([[Pontifical Gregorian University|Gregorian University of Rome]], 2006) p. 7.</ref> === Document dating === Palaeography may be employed to provide information about the date at which a document was written. However, "paleography is a last resort for dating" and, "for book hands, a period of 50 years is the least acceptable spread of time"<ref>{{cite book |last=Turner |first=Eric G. |year=1987 |title=Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World |edition=2nd |place=London |publisher=Institute of Classical Studies }}</ref><ref name="nongbri24">{{cite journal |url=http://people.uncw.edu/zervosg/papyrology/nongbri%20p52%20misuse.pdf |last=Nongbri |first=Brent |year=2005 |title=The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel |journal=Harvard Theological Review |volume=98 |pages=23–48 (24) |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150216200012/http://people.uncw.edu/zervosg/papyrology/nongbri%20p52%20misuse.pdf |archive-date=16 February 2015 |doi=10.1017/S0017816005000842 |s2cid=163128006 |accessdate=21 November 2014 }}</ref> with it being suggested that "the 'rule of thumb' should probably be to avoid dating a hand more precisely than a range of at least seventy or eighty years".<ref name="nongbri24" /> In a 2005 e-mail addendum to his 1996 "The Paleographical Dating of P-46" paper Bruce W. Griffin stated "Until more rigorous methodologies are developed, it is difficult to construct a 95% confidence interval for [[[New Testament]]] manuscripts without allowing a century for an assigned date."<ref>Griffin, Bruce W. (1996), [http://www.biblical-data.org/P-46%20Oct%201997.pdf "The Paleographical Dating of P-46"]</ref> [[William Schniedewind]] went even further in the abstract to his 2005 paper "Problems of Paleographic Dating of Inscriptions" and stated: "The so-called science of paleography often relies on [[circular reasoning]] because there is insufficient data to draw precise conclusion about dating. Scholars also tend to oversimplify diachronic development, assuming models of simplicity rather than complexity".<ref name="Schniedewind, William M. 2005">{{cite book |last=Schniedewind |first=William M. |author-link=William Schniedewind |year=2005 |chapter=Problems of Paleographic Dating of Inscriptions |editor1-first=Thomas |editor1-last=Levy |editor2-first=Thomas |editor2-last=Higham |title=The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating: Archaeology, Text and Science |publisher=Routledge |isbn=1-84553-057-8}}</ref>
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