raud or to error. Some copyists
have deliberately modified or suppressed passages.[70] Nearly all
copyists have committed errors of judgment or accidental errors. Errors
of judgment when half-educated and not wholly intelligent copyists have
thought it their duty to correct passages and words in the original
which they could not understand.[71] Accidental errors when they misread
while copying, or misheard while writing from dictation, or when they
involuntarily made slips of the pen.

Modifications arising from fraud or errors of judgment are often very
difficult to rectify, or even to discover. Some accidental errors (the
omission of several lines, for example) are irreparable in the case we
are considering, that of a unique copy. But most accidental errors can
be detected by any one who knows the ordinary forms: confusions of
sense, letters, and words, transpositions of words, letters, and
syllables, dittography (unmeaning repetition of letters or syllables),
haplography (syllables or words written once only where they should have
been written twice), false divisions between words, badly punctuated
sentences, and other mistakes of the same kind. Errors of these various
types have been made by the scribes of every country and every age,
irrespectively of the handwriting and language of the originals. But
some confusions of letters occur frequently in copies of uncial
originals, and others in copies of minuscule originals. Confusions of
sense and of words are explained by analogies of vocabulary or
pronunciation, which naturally vary from language to language and from
epoch to epoch. The general theory of conjectural emendation reduces to
the sketch we have just given; there is no general apprenticeship to the
art. What a man learns is not to restore any text that may be put before
him, but Greek texts, Latin texts, French texts, and so on, as the case
may be; for the conjectural emendation of a text presupposes, besides
general notions on the processes by which texts degenerate, a profound
knowledge of (1) a special language; (2) a special handwriting; (3) _the
confusions (of sense, letters, and words) which were habitual to those
who copied texts of that language written in that style of handwriting_.
To aid in the apprenticeship to the conjectural emendation of Greek and
Latin texts, tabulated lists (alphabetical and systematic) of various
readings, frequent confusions, and probable corrections, have been
drawn up.[