Channel dissociation

A single copying mistake can give away how a text actually travelled. This page gathers conjectures that read the shape of an error as a clue: a slip made by an eye copying from an exemplar -- the manuscript being copied from -- looks different from a mishearing made by an ear, or a slip made by a memory reciting from habit. Because those three routes leave different kinds of damage behind, the type of mistake a passage carries can itself diagnose which channel it actually travelled through, even when no direct record of the copying or the performance survives.

The ear rhymes, the exam spells and Muqabala has ears, not eyes both look for that diagnostic split directly -- whether a text's errors rhyme with what an ear mishears rather than what an eye misreads, and whether a grammatical method that works by ear behaves differently from one that works by eye. Khipu redundancy applies the same logic to a very different medium: Andean khipu cords, the knotted and coloured strings some Andean societies used to keep records instead of writing. It asks whether a knotted, tactile medium builds in redundancy the way a spoken or written channel does. Merit copies sutras, catalogues keep sastras compares how devotional scripture and technical commentary are copied within the same tradition, testing whether the "sacred" channel really is held to a stricter copying standard than the merely useful one.