Some Notes On Editions of the Towneley Cycle: Part 1

One of my interests is old manuscripts and how they come into the modern world.  Whether those texts are biblical, legal, historical, poetic, or whatever, they tend to preserve in their physical form some fingerprints of the time and place in which they originate.  As products of human minds and endeavors, they therefore also contain signals about the minds that produced them.

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Riparian Grammar School: Parataxis and Why It's The Most Important Grammatical Idea You've Never Heard Of

Two things probably leaped out at you immediately.

One is that it’s a little difficult to organize the information.  We depend on paragraphs, line-breaks, punctuation (including quotation marks) to tell us what the relationships are between elements in the language.  That is, we think syntactically, not paratactically like Mark does.  That makes parataxis a little difficult to read at first.  But it’s like wearing glasses: after a little while your brain adjusts to it and you see things a little differently.

Second, the text organizes itself in surprising ways.  I’ll bet you noticed relationships between images that hadn’t occurred to you before. 

That is, you’ve begun to think a little more like the biblical writers.  And whether you’re a believer or not, it’s just kind of nice to feel you understand them a little better.

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