Wrong separation of words
Besides correcting the spelling of his original, a
Carolingian scribe had to attend to the proper separation
of the words and to the punctuation of the sentence.
Punctuation, unless in a very rudimentary form,
1 can
hardly be said to be known in Latin MSS. till the
Carolingian period; and although in the more carefully
written ancient MSS.
2 we find the words ticked off
from each other by dots, the separation of words in
Latin MSS. may be put down to the credit of minuscule
copyists.
3 A thorough separation, indeed, is not
found in the earlier minuscule MSS., for small words,
such as prepositions, pronouns, and particles, are
usually joined to longer neighbouring words, a practice
which is exemplified on every page of the Plautus MSS.
(e.g.
Capt. 10 “
inalide”
BDE,
34 “
depreda”
DEJ,
dequestoribus
BDE, for
in Alide, de praeda, de quaestoribus).
4 This has
often led to the loss of these small dependents. For
example, in
Cas. 854 “
i belle bellalula” the first word has
been lost in our existing minuscule MSS., probably
because
ibelle, so written, was taken for the same barbarous
spelling of
belle as
ischola, quoted above, of
schola; in
Rud. 875 “
obsecro me”, written
obsecrome, has
become in
B obsecrom and in
CD obsecro.
Keller
(Epilegomena zu Hora:) explains the loss of i in a
class of Horace MSS. in
“dum favet nox et Venus, i secundo
omine,
”
by the supposition that i was written with a point before and
after it, .i., and that these points were mistaken for
puncta
delentia (
ch. iv. § 1, below).
