about this edition

de editione

The texts of this edition are transcribed letter for letter from publicly available witnesses — books and editions of the 1962 liturgy — and collated: no divergence in the letters themselves is tolerated, and accidental differences (punctuation, capitals) carry recorded rulings in a critical apparatus. The witnesses, critical apparatus and all edition data are open in the corpus repository.

Every word's analysis — lemma and parse — is checked mechanically by two independent open Latin analyzers: Whitaker's Words and Collatinus. The word panel names each word's confirmers; “editorial” is the edition's own work — the glosses, translations, notes and rulings.

It is worth being plain about what that check proves. The analyzers read the form: they say which parses a form admits. Nearly three fifths of the words in this edition have an ambiguous form — “María” admits twelve readings — so agreement means our parse is among the possible ones, not that it is the only one. Choosing the right reading in context is the edition's own act, and it is that choice which awaits expert review. The two analyzers are independent programs with largely different dictionaries, but they share one source: Lewis & Short.

“Accepted” on a word means its parse agrees with the analyzers' votes; “awaiting review” marks a layer still to be verified. The whole remains a working edition until review by a Latinist; errors are possible and corrections welcome.