Another rather pleasing thing about this sort of aural proofreading has to do with the shapes the letters make. When writing, some letters make very pleasing shapes on the page – the taggin, or how they fit in with the other letters around them, that sort of thing: It’s just nice. And sometimes pleasing three-dimensional […]
A funny thing about checking the letters like this is that you completely lose track of where you are in the Torah. When you’re writing, you say the words out loud as you’re going along. You’re going very slowly, so you might forget what was happening a few paragraphs before, but you know what’s happening […]
December 30, 2009 – 21:56
There’s still chance for human error though – misspeaking, mishearing, losing the place, saying “hang on a minute” when marking an error and needing to re-establish the place afterwards, going too fast and missing bits, going too slow and wasting time. Plus, it still takes a long time, and paying someone to sit there and […]
December 29, 2009 – 21:56
Broadening our scope back into the general activity of proofreading, we left off with me saying that one person checking the Torah by reference to a tikkun isn’t terribly efficient, for several reasons. This is why tradition developed an alternative process, in which a Reader has the tikkun and a Sofer has the klaf. The […]
December 28, 2009 – 21:55
Proofreading also picks up on things which are technically kosher and wouldn’t make the reader confused, but just aren’t very pretty. This stage is a tricky one, because there’s always, always going to be stuff you could have done better, and if you’re not careful you’ll drive yourself into a frenzy of ever more microscopic […]
December 27, 2009 – 21:54
The astute will have worked out by now that this Torah has advanced into the proofreading stage, writing and proofreading happening simultaneously. I just thought I’d mention that.
December 26, 2009 – 21:53
As a keen Torah reader myself, I’m well aware of those horrible moments when you’re reading along and you look at the Torah and you think “huh? what on EARTH is that?!” When I’m proofreading, I try to pick up on that sort of thing. Here’s an example. That mem and nun are a bit […]
December 25, 2009 – 21:53
Pasul letter mem Proofreading has to pick up on letters which have real problems in their form. Maybe the scribe’s hand slipped, maybe the letter got smudged by accident, maybe the ink spread after being put on – letters can go wrong, and we don’t always notice while we’re writing. So proofreading has to be […]
December 24, 2009 – 23:52
We saw an example of one sort of thing which proofreading turns up – where the text is Just Wrong: Text should read שמנה מאת שנה. That was a case where the extra letter vav completely changed the meaning – “eight hundred” became “one hundred and eight.” But in some cases, an extra or missing […]
December 24, 2009 – 21:51
All this place-finding and looking up and down takes time. Only a couple of seconds each time, but that adds up fast, as you can probably imagine. Holding a string of letters in your mind isn’t efficient either, partly just because one can forget things, and partly because of anticipation; when you’re reading the text […]
