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Method of correcting transposition in MSS

The usual way of correcting a transposition in a MS. was by drawing faint sloping lines like accent strokes above the two transposed words. The transposition of frater and dare in Aul. 158 was corrected in some such way in the original of BD (which, as we have seen on p. 7, was the archetype of EJ), for B has rightly frater dare, D has dare frater with the transposition-sign faithfully copied, EJ have dare frater with no sign, so that in the original of EJ these marks had been neglected.

In the Laurentian MS. of Nonius at Florence the same marks were used to correct the transposition of syllables in lacinium, wrongly written for lanicium (i.e. lanitium); but the scribe of the Harleian MS., which is a direct copy of the Laurentian, curiously mistook them for marks of deletion, and has written laum. If we had not the original from which the Harleian MS. was copied, how difficult it would have been to account for this corruption!

An Introduction to Latin Textual Emendation Based on the Text of Plautus. W. M. Lindsay. Anne Mahoney. edited for Perseus. London. Macmillan. 1896.

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