Talk:Apographa

Please rewrite and move to 'Apograph'!
The lemma word should have the singular form apograph. In scholarly usage, the plural form today, notwithstanding the web-version of Merriam-Webster, is rather apographs  than apographa. The article should adduce both plural forms.

Apograph is symply the philological term for 'direct copy'. The antonym is not autograph, as the author of the present article believed, but antigraph, referring to the exemplar from which the apograph was copied directly, instead of depending from it only indirectly.

The question of the autography or heterography of the antigraph is irrelevant for this terminological distinction. The exemplar at the root of a given set of manuscript copies is called protograph and may be an autograph written by the author, a scribal manuscript dictated by him, a manuscript produced by one or multiple secondary scribes as a collection of, or compilation from, multiple works, and so on. The term apograph relates only to the direct relationship between two physical exemplars, regardless of their position in the stemma, and has nothing to do with the content.

It is a purely technical term of philology and textual criticism in all fields of textual and manscript studies, and is not particularly closely related to the study of sacred texts, as the author of the present article believed.

The article should be rewritten from scractch and confined to five or six lines, because there is really not more to say about this subject. In its present form, it is part of the amateurish heritage of religious inspiration left by User:Namarly before he was permanently blocked. Apologies for my English, I am not a native speaker, but a German philologist irritated to find such a bad article on the Web. -- 2003:C9:2741:C400:1578:FB99:4440:56D2 (talk) 06:56, 12 June 2024 (UTC)


 * You make some excellent points. Can you draft a rewritten article and post it here with appropriate references?  I'd be happy to work with you on it. Nowa (talk) 21:01, 12 June 2024 (UTC)