Transposition of syllables and letters
The transposition of syllables and of letters is usually an indication of an uneducated copyist. In
Epid. 285, for example,
te nolo was written
te lono.
Forms like
dixti, 2nd singular perfect indicative, being unfamiliar to
the scribe of the archetype (p. 9), often appear as
dixit etc., the scribe having regarded them as illiterate spellings
of this kind (cf.
Capt. 155).
Often the cause is to be found in the practice of writing letters like a, u above the line in early minuscule (cf.
Thompson
Greek and Latin Palaeography p. 228);
at might
thus become
ta, tu might become
ut. The letter h, especially
when added as a correction, was frequently written in the form of the Greek rough-breathing or "daseia" (as in
῾ο) above the line (e.g.
Amph. 299 hercle, in the original of
BDEJ); and an
h so written
was in danger, not only of being overlooked by a copyist or mistaken for another letter, but also of being written before
instead of after the letter above which it stood. In a Bodleian fifteenth-century MS. of Virgil (Canon. Lat. 61),
written in Italy, the word
Daphnim in
Ecl. v. 20 was first
miscopied as
dahpnim, then corrected; and it is clear from various indications that in the original
the h was expressed by this suprascript sign.