Collating a Nasalized Vowel in an Ahunavaiti Gatha Stanza
During a manuscript collation workshop, a student is preparing a school edition of one stanza from the Ahunavaiti Gatha. Two nineteenth-century paper copies agree on almost every letter, but they diverge at a single word: copy A gives the sequence transliterated aŋhąm, while copy B gives aŋhə̄m. The word stands immediately before a word beginning with t-, and the metre requires a heavy syllable at that point. The student notices that copy B's scribe elsewhere writes ə̄ where other manuscripts of the same family have ą, while copy A generally preserves the nasalized letter. No facsimile of the oldest manuscript is available in the classroom, and the teacher insists on a reasoned editorial decision rather than a majority vote. The class must also record the variant in an apparatus that an examiner can follow.
1. Which reading should the student print, and what evidence would make the student change that decision?
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The student should not choose by counting copies. First parse the word in its sentence: the two endings belong to different grammatical categories, so the syntax must show whether a nasalized long vowel or a non-nasalized ə̄ is required. Second, check the metre: if only one reading supplies the heavy syllable demanded by the line, that reading is preferred. Third, assess scribal habit: copy B repeatedly substitutes ə̄ for ą, so B is a less reliable witness for this particular feature, while A preserves the nasalized letter more consistently. On those grounds the student should print A's aŋhąm, but only after noting that the grammatical parse is decisive. The decision would be overturned if a parallel passage, an older manuscript, or an unambiguous inflection showed that the context requires ə̄; in that case B would be retained despite its scribal tendency.
2. Write the apparatus entry and explain what each part of the entry is doing.
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A suitable entry would read: aŋhąm A : aŋhə̄m B; A retained because B's scribe regularly replaces ą with ə̄ in this manuscript family; grammar and metre favour the nasalized reading. The siglum before the colon states the accepted reading and its witness; the reading after the colon is the rejected variant and its support. The note after the semicolon gives the reason, not merely the fact of divergence: it distinguishes an orthographic habit from a genuine phonological variant. If the grammatical parse remained uncertain, the student should add 'fort. aŋhə̄m' or a query rather than silence. The examiner is looking for the distinction between a manuscript spelling and a linguistic reading, and for the recognition that a scribal tendency can lower a witness's weight for one feature without making that witness worthless everywhere.