If you had something important to write down in ancient times, you would usually write in Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. University lecturer Joanne Stolk has been awarded an ERC grant to explore the kinds of spelling mistakes that were made in these scripts. And, more importantly, what improvements the writers made.
Most of the texts Stolk will study have survived from Egypt. This is because papyrus is best preserved in the warm, dry climate. 'We have personal letters and official documents, as well as literary works, sometimes in the author's own handwriting or copied,' Stolk says. 'In total, we have more than 60,000 scripts, and texts are still being added regularly.'
Errors or language development?
Those texts offer a wealth of information about Egyptian society, but also about the way Greek was used there. 'We regularly see Greek that by our standards is of poor quality,' says Stolk. 'All sorts of explanations have been thought up for this: on the one hand, the writers would have had limited education or the texts would have been written by people who mastered Greek as a second language. On the other hand, it could be a sign of language change. The errors would then not always be mistakes, but a development towards New Greek as we know it.'
In developing these theories, there was one aspect that remained neglected: the opinions of the writers themselves. Indeed, they not only regularly made mistakes, they also corrected them. It is precisely those corrections that Stolk wants to look at. Stolk: 'Before we start looking for all kinds of explanations for the "mistakes", it will be good to map out what was considered an error at the time. If you see that one form was never corrected, it is probably our anachronistic view that defines it as wrong, not the norm of the time.'
It is in any event a form of respect for the writers to look at the corrections, she thinks. 'If you see that they corrected their mistakes, they therefore did know how it "should be done",' she says. 'Moreover, we have so far considered most of the texts as finished products, but when you see that some of them have crossings out, you wonder if we might often be looking at draft versions, in which a spelling mistake or flawed wording is of a different order than in a finished product.'
Ancient Greek text with corrections 
Database
To answer these kinds of questions, Stolk and her team will first set up a database for all the corrections. 'We know that some alternative spellings are common, but we don't see so many of, say, accidentally omitted letters in editions now, probably precisely because they were corrected quickly. I expect these types of errors to start popping up more often among corrections, which in turn gives us arguments to show that other uncorrected "errors" were actually, at the time, fully accepted language varieties or language changes. Why else would an author correct one error and not another?'
In addition, Stolk's research offers opportunities for other specialisations. 'The database can also be useful for historians, for example to see how a term developed over time and how it was used in practice. At the same time, our approach to looking at corrections in linguistic research can also be applicable to researchers whose expertise is another language, such as Dutch, German or French.'
