Habinek (1985), pp. 10-11. Shorter cola were known as commata /ˈkɒmətə/ (singular comma), in Latin (singular ), which also often display rhythmic endings.Shewring & Denniston (1970), §16.Cunningham (1957), p. 499.
|
|
In Ancient Greek rhetoric, a comma (κόμμα komma, plural κόμματα kommata) is a short clause, something less than a colon. In the system of Aristophanes of Byzantium, commata were separated by middle interpuncts. In antiquity, a comma was defined as a combination of words that has no more than eight syllables.
|
|
The text is arranged "per cola et commata", that is, the length of a line serves to clarify the sense of the text. The text is divided identically as the text of the Codex Amiatinus. The first lines of each chapter are written with red ink. The beginning of the Fourth Book of Kings is marked by an enlarged initial P decorated with red dots.
|
|
Before Chrysanthos' Theoretika (the Eisagoge was simply an extract, while the Mega Theoretikon was published by his student Panagiotes Pelopides), exact proportions were never mentioned in Greek chant theory. His system of 68 commata which is based on a corrupted use of arithmetics, can be traced back to the division of 12:11 x 88:81 x 9:8 = 4:3 between α and δ.Chrysanthos (1832, Μερ. Α', Βιβ.
|
|
In 1907 Pope Pius X commissioned the Benedictine monks in Rome to prepare a critical edition of Jerome's Vulgate, entitled Biblia Sacra iuxta latinam vulgatam versionem, which eventually emerged as a counterpart Old Testament to the Oxford New Testament, following largely the same critical principles, and according similar primary status to the Codex Amiatinus text (other than for the Psalms); and similarly deriving its layout, cola et commata from Amiatinus. 18 vols.
|
|
It is written in uncial characters, large, clear, regular, and beautiful, two columns to a page, and 43 or 44 lines to a column. A little space is often left between words, but the writing is in general continuous. The text is divided into sections, which in the Gospels correspond closely to the Ammonian Sections. There are no marks of punctuation, but the skilled reader was guided into the sense by stichometric, or verse-like, arrangement into cola and commata, which correspond roughly to the principal and dependent clauses of a sentence.
|
|
Harris gave the following description of this fragment: > Two leaves of a sixth century MS. Of the Gospels, the first of the leaves > having lost its upper half. The second leaf, having been folded in the > middle when used to bind some other MS., has become illegible where it was > folded. The hand is a large bold script, and the MS. From which the > fragments came must have been a very fine one. The text is broken into short > commata which are distinguished by a mart of punctuation: occasionally there > are traces of the use of a colon as a mark of punctuation, and of as > aspirate or perhaps a diacritic mark, (see the third line of Fol. 1, recto): > we have printed this last as if it were an aspirate, but with some > hesitation; it looks more like the pair of dots which denote initial iota > connected by a scribe’s flourish.
|
|
The first was to present the text in sense lines per cola et commata, that is to say putting individual phrases or clauses on new lines, with no other indications of punctuation. The second was to reconstruct the earliest text solely on the authority of primary manuscript witnesses dating from before the 11th century (a few later Bibles are selectively cited in the apparatus, but not used for the texts). Consequently, for the most part, the later medieval development of the Vulgate text is apparent in these critical editions only in citations of variants printed from the Sistine and Sixto-Clementine editions; albeit that these can only provide two snap-shots of the wide range of variant readings found in medieval texts. Neither in the Old nor New Testaments, do the critical editions print conjectural readings (even in instances of manifest error or contamination, such as pietatis for timoris Domini at Isaiah 11:2).
|
|
In 1587 Pope Sixtus V demanded the book be sent to Rome where it was consulted for a new papal edition of the Bible, the Sixtine Vulgate;De Hamel, p.64 although in the event, little or no use was made of its readings in either the Sistine or subsequent Sixto-Clementine official Vulgate editions, whose editors rather preferred later medieval Vulgate texts and editions now known to have been heavily corrupted by non-Vulgate readings. In view of the many accumulated corruptions in all published editions of the Vulgate so far, the Oxford University Press accepted in 1878 a proposal from classicist John Wordsworth (later Bishop of Salisbury) to produce a new critical edition of the Vulgate New Testament. This was eventually published as Nouum Testamentum Domini nostri Iesu Christi Latine, secundum editionem sancti Hieronymi in three volumes between 1889 and 1954; 3 vols, the Codex Amiatinus being a primary source for the entire text; which also followed this manuscript in presenting the text in sense lines, cola et commata without any other indication of punctuation.
|
|