[split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections

[eggyk]

Unusual or rare forms don't necessarily indicate mistakes. For instance the word <chedy> occurs only once in Currier A but is the most frequent word in Currier B. A single occurrence of a form that looks unusual in one section may simply reflect a stage in the text's evolution rather than a scribal mistake.

Isn't that a totally different point though? Spelling mistakes aren't necessarily 1 way and they should tend to be 1 or two letters difference. Like Jorge's example, strings like air may be misspelt as ain, but that works in reverse too. 

If we're talking about someone transcribing/ retracing from a difficult to read text that reads "ai?", a guessing scribe will end up writing both. 

As for the idea that mistakes are widespread, there are some experiments that could be done. For example, if you hypothesise that the following are common mistakes:

a <-> o 
r <-> n

It could be the case that the % of mistakes between a -> o is quite consistent throughout the text and across words. If that is so, there should be an "a variant" and a "o variant" of various words across the manuscript. Comparing the ratio between various a/o variants may show a pattern. Perhaps common words containing "a" have an "o" variant with ~20% the frequency on average, who knows.

However, if there are extremely common words containing "a" which have 0% "o" variants frequency, it points against those letters being mistaken for eachother imo.