One form of textual criticism (which is under the branch of corpus linguistics) is arguing that a text was mistakenly copied by a copyist to reflect an erroneous reading. An example of this is that the copyist may have copied one letter of the text when he meant to copy a different, orthographically-similar letter. What is the technical term for this sort of error? (I'm looking for a word that would be used alongside words like dittography and haplography).
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1 Answer
This type of error is not one that's commonly discussed in textual criticism literature as it is often easy to identify and rarely has a significant impact on the text. But I did find one relevant term for this: permutation.
According to the glossary at tetragrammaton.org, permutation is:
Unintentional Variants > Errors caused by a visual difficulty during the copy process:
I.A.1. Permutation. Letters which resemble one another are difficult to distinguish. This is especially true if the letters were not written carefully in the manuscript which is being copied and if the copyist is hurrying, is working in poor light, or suffers from astigmatism. The copyist reads the text as representing a different word or combination of words. When an unusual change is found in a manuscript involving letters which look alike, then it is possible that the error arose from permutation.
