Meaning of separative error | Babel Free

Definitions

An error indicating that one manuscript has not been copied from another.

Examples

“1975, Robert Krueger (ed.), The Poems of Sir John Davies, Oxford: Clarendon Press, Commentary, p. 318, Although the three extant manuscripts show different states of revision, no one descends from another; each has separative errors.”

“2012, Marko Halonen, Stemmatology of a 16ᵗʰ Century Chronicle, Master’s Thesis, Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki, p. 16, A separative error can reveal [to] us that a certain manuscript was not copied from another manuscript. […] For example, the scribe of manuscript A missed a whole line of a text when he was copying. Now the text in manuscript A makes no sense (because a whole line is missing), but it would be impossible for the scribe of J to know what exactly is missing and to add it absolutely correctly. If J, then has kept this line which is clearly missing from A, we can argue that J is not a copy of A, but a copy of another manuscript, which had not missed that line […]”

CEFR level