recension
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: simple
Etymology: From Latin recēnsiō (“enumeration; review; reassessment”), from recēnseō (“to count, reckon; to examine, review; to go over, revise”), from re- (“again”) (from Proto-Italic *wre (“again”); further etymology uncertain) + cēnseō (“to give an opinion; to suppose, think; to assess”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱn̥seh₁-, *ḱn̥seye- (“to announce”)).
Inflected forms:
form: recensions
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: A census, an enumeration, a review, a survey.
pos: noun
examples: The recenſion of the inhabitants is conſidered, firſt, 'with reſpect to the general population, and to the local diſtribution of them into counties, towns, boroughs, villages, and pariſhes.' Among the conveniences expected from ſuch an annual recenſion, it is obſerved, that 'one might ſee what counties, towns, or pariſhes, diſpeopled faſteſt, or made a contrary progreſs.[…]'
gloss: A critical revision of a text.
pos: noun
examples: Of Theon of Alexandria, there remain a recension of Euclid's Elements, Scholia on Aratus, and a Commentary on the Syntaxis of Ptolemy.
That this text is evidently a more antient recension of the same Syriac Gospel of St. Matthew, which, so far as we have the means of tracing it, appears to have been always in use in the Syriac canon, and that the variations in the subsequent recension, called the Peshito, have arisen from comparison with the Greek, by which it has been modified and brought in many places into closer conformity with the Greek; […]
And so in different recensions, different poems will appear in different places.
Since the 1895 text edition of Bensly–James, it has been recognized that each of the three parts of the 2 Esdras corpus exists in two distinct textual recensions. In each work, the two recensions divide along the lines of the same manuscripts: mss S and A consistently manifest a recension labeled by James the 'French', while the remaining mss CMNEVL show a recension that James called the 'Spanish'.
gloss: A text established by critical revision.
pos: noun
examples: The Śatapatha-Bráhmaṇa has been commented in the Mádhyaṃdina recension by Harisvámin and Sáyaṇa; but their commentaries are so far extant only in a fragmentary form. The Vṛihad-Áraṇyaka has been explained by Dviveda Gan̄ga (of Gujarát); and in the Káṇva recension by Śaṃkara, to whose commentary a number of other works by his pupils, &c., attach themselves.
The first to publish a complete translation of any Recension of the Book of the Dead was [Samuel] Birch, who in 1867 gave an English version of the Turin papyrus in the fifth volume of [Christian Charles Josias von] Bunsen, Egypt's Place in the Universal History, pp. 123–333. Notwithstanding the fact that the Recension here translated is the Saïte or latest of all, and that the text of the Turin MS. is faulty in many places, Birch's rendering gave a new impulse to the study of the Egyptian religion, and it has formed the groundwork of the translations made by Egyptologists subsequently.
gloss: A family of manuscripts which share similar traits; the variety of a language which is used in such manuscripts.
pos: noun
examples: The existence of two major literary centres in the First Bulgarian Empire led to the emergence of two recensions of Old Church Slavonic: the Bulgarian Recension and the Macedonian Recension.
The Russian recension of Old Church Slavonic emerged after the 10th century and was characterized by the substitution of /u/ for the nasal sound /õ/.
As the Hebrew manuscripts which have been in use since the eleventh century have all been corrected according to some particular recension or edition, they have from this circumstance been classed into Families, according to the country where such recension has obtained. These families or recensions are three or four in number, […]
Next, what is meant by the more accurate copies of the Nyssene father? Were they the copies which were most carefully written? This would seem to be what he meant by the expression; but in deciding his question, we are not to ask about the care of the transcribers, but by what critics the text was settled, to what Recension the Mss. [manuscripts] belonged. Was it to the Recension of Origen, Hesychius, or Lucian? Certainly not to Origen's, or the Palestinian Recension; for Victor of Antioch and the Scholiasts are unanimous in stating, that the Παλαιστιναῖον εὐαγγέλιον contained the verses.
Nor is it true, as asserted by some writers, that the modern Bulgarian dialect has made the widest departure of any from the old Slavic tongue. While many of the grammatical inflexions have ceased to appear, yet the radical words remain substantially the same as in the days of Cyril and Methodius, and we will hazard the statement that if the most ancient copy of the Gospel before the Russian recension were read in the presence of Bulgarians and Russians it would be no less intelligible to the former than to the latter.
Related words: recense
redaction
Derived words: recensional
recensionist
Translations: