Wednesday 4 September 2013

Correction marks in the Dunhuang manuscripts


From: Chinese manuscripts by Imre Galembos


With their span of six hundred some years, the Dunhuang manuscripts are
a valuable witness of the process of textual transmission in medieval China.
Beside looking at this process from the perspective of texts and their many
versions or editions, the examination of less deliberate scribal habits in
manuscripts can also be meaningful. In this paper I look at the way medieval
scribes corrected mistakes and show that although we have practically
no evidence that the notation used for this purpose would have been
part of an official teaching curriculum, it nevertheless remained surprisingly
consistent over the centuries. This diachronic stability of the notation
system reveals the direct continuity of the scribal tradition, which is at
times less evident in the transmission of texts…
Download a PDF copy of the full paper here: Correction marks in the Dunhuang manuscripts.
Bibliographic information:
Imre Galambos,  ”Correction marks in the Dunhuang manuscripts,” in Imre Galambos, ed., Studies in Chinese Manuscripts: From the Warring States Period to the 20th Century, Budapest: ELTE Institute of East Asian Studies, 2013.

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