Cladistics and Stemmatics

I am presently fully engaged in the collation work of the Nyāyamañjarī (sixth āhnika). So far I collated a portion of NM6 (about one-tenth of the āhnika) using all the available sources, and traced a preliminary stemma For this purpose I used Cladistics software (Paups and McClade), and found it is a useful tool, especially to save time in statistic examination of the data and in checking possible combinations with a good graphic interface.

The tree produced by the software, however, needs to be elaborated into a real genealogic stemma; the software basically is focused on showing similarities and dissimalarities between the “taxa” (i.e. the mss) so it shows them all at the bottom of the tree, reconstructing possible branchings and nodes (i.e. archetypes) that have lead to their evolution. Each textual variant is read by the software as a “character”, and different readings of the same variants in different mss are read as “states” of the same “character” (for example the dimension (state) of the tail (character) in different stages of evolution from ape to human being). In the example here, the tree shows the positions of the taxa (mss) in relation to the character (variant) “bhotsyase” and its various states (bhotsyase, votsusa etc.).

A major problem of the cladistic software is that it reasons in bipartitic terms, that is: from a node it always generates two branches, although in the real world of textual transmission from a single archetype any number of copies may have been produced. This is a serious issue in stemmatics that needs to be sorted out.

In my present stemma, the Allahabad (Ad) and Mysore (Md) mss are likely to be one the transcript of the other (I am not yet sure which one of the two is the apograph). Although it is early to give other verdicts, I am under the impression that the Calicut (Cm in my sigla) and the Pune Bühler (PBs) mss preserve important readings not found elsewhere. Also, I did not find evidence of contamination between sources, except for the Sanskrit College ms (VCd) which has marginalia clearly coming from horizontal tradition. The position of the Deccan College (PDd), Srinagar (Ss) and Kolkata (Kd) mss in the tree is still particularly problematic.

It seems overall a good situation towards a feasible stemma.