A controversial interpretation of a text could ask textual critics of texts relatively ancient to choose between preserve and correct. Preserving, in a critical way, could be the right choice in textual restoration, but often textual...
moreA controversial interpretation of a text could ask textual critics of texts relatively ancient to choose between preserve and correct. Preserving, in a critical way, could be the right choice in textual restoration, but often textual critics choose to unduly emend according to modern language. It happens more often in rising philologies as the one applied to Sardinian poetic texts, where a philological school has missed and the period of Sardinian linguistic history from the 15th to 18thcentury is scarcely known. Through examples from the Sardinian poetic tradition (Antonio Cano, Francesco Ignazio Mannu, Pisurzi) the paper describes cases where the corrections are made not because of errors (assumed) but because of lectiones difficiliores under the linguistic angle, or becoming of such nature according to the modern perception. The process through which the textual critics make this kind of corrections is similar to the process that underlies to the transmission of texts where misreading and recoding confirm the concept of diasystem applied to textual criticism (Cesare Segre); in Sardinian case (as in others cases of bilingualism or various degrees of diglossia) the concept can be complicated by the stratification of different linguistic diasystems, consisting in the interference between Sardinian language and prestige varieties which it had been interacting with over ages.
