Month: February 2024

Reading Response 2

This text was very confusing for me at first, I didn’t quite understand exactly what the text was arguing about when talking about written literature and printed literature. I never really thought that there was a difference between these 2 ways of producing writings but after reading this text by Müller I now see the significance in an original copy of a writing on paper compared to the reproduced copies of the original. I feel a good example of this would be the vast array of versions of the Bible. The first written bible is currently in the Vatican library like you’d expect; this bible is parchment that was written on with ink by hand, not a reproduced copy that’s been translated or altered in any way. Now take that original copy of the Bible and put it next to a recently printed version of the New Testament of the Catholic bible that has been translated and changed over a thousand years and i’m sure you will find a vast difference. The original bible was written by four greek scribes and the entire thing is hand written, we can trace the entirety of the New Testament back to the Codex Vaticanus, but the New Testament we know now is different from the direct greek-english translation of the Bible. It’s been morphed over the years to follow along with the ever changing grammatical rules of the English language along with the unreliability of the transcriber who did the translation, as they could interpret the Bible in a different way than another transcriber as there is not always direct translations between languages. Another aspect of this that you could consider is how many different religions sprang from this text, even though they all honor the same god the religions have their major differences and all have different versions of essentially the same story. Someone read the Bible interpreted it in a different way than the traditional Catholic Church does and then split from the Catholic Church and started another catholic denomination that we now call christianity. Essentially these religions honor the same god and have the same morals but are now two entirely different religions because two groups people interpreted the Bible differently. (Not to mention all the socioeconomic and political attributes that pushed this split of religion as well, but it still comes down to the fact that someone interpreted something different from someone else when reading and now there are hundreds of versions of the Bible.)

To bring us all back to the point I was attempting to make; nothing is more reliable than the original copy, interpretation dictates and guides all further knowledge that is passed down generation to generation, and I understand why primary sources are so important in scholarly work now.

Reading Response 1

I found this reading very informative. I feel like we as people often over look the mundane and simply choose not to question its origin or reasoning. Though, I know this is not true for everyone, I would say it’s a an accurate assumption for the majority. I would never have though that the letter J had such a historical and significant purpose. Languages and alphabets don’t interest me very much but learning about the origin of the letter J might have changed that for me. The letter J was the last letter to join the Roman alphabet along with V and W. I originally thought they were lined up in chronological order of creation but it’s much more purposeful than that. The letter J came from the letter “I” and before the creation of the letter J all words that now start with J were written with an “I” and all of those J words were pronounced with a U sound. For example, Junior would be pronounced YOUnior, and names like Julius Caesar would be YOUlius Ceaser. It’s such an interesting thought to think about how language morphs and changes over time, and it’s never a blunt change, it’s always a slow changing process. I couldn’t imagine our current alphabet or language looking any other way but a thousand years from now some researchers might look at our current language and think how silly or incomplete it looks. My other Initial was G and that letter came from the letter C, which honestly makes sense, they are very similar looking already and have a similar form in the mouth when sounding the letter, Guh and Cuh.