Overlap in Greek graded readers.
Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2018 2:29 am
So to improve my Greek and keep in practice, I've got a bunch of those books that have adapted small passages in Greek intended for those students who have completed two semesters of Greek but aren't ready to tackle Attic literature head on. I imagine everyone knows what I'm talking about, but some examples are the books by Morice, Moss, Freeman and Lowe, etc..
In a couple of cases, specifically Morice's Morice's Stories in Attic Greek and Moss' A First Greek Reader, there is a LOT more overlap between these than I'd expect, or that I'd attribute to chance. Something is going on here, and I'm curious as to what.
Of course, we expect some overlap. It would be no surprise if anyone assembling such a book chose to adapt the first hundred words of Xenophon's Anabasis, so when that shows up more than once in these books that's no surprise. Similarly, some of these authors choose to adapt Aesop, and some of them will choose the same fables to adapt. I know Morice chose to do a free adaptation of a bunch of segments from Plutarch, and he took from Aelian and Pausanias with minor changes, so if someone else drew from the same sources, I'd also expect some overlap.
I'm going through Moss right now, and I've hit a segment were nearly everything is also found in Morice, published eight years earlier. Moss' stories numbered from the 60s to the 100s (and perhaps beyond, that's as far as I've gotten) all have nearly identical analogues in Morice, and in the same order (although with larger gaps between the similar selections in Morice than Moss.) In all cases, they are divided into the same number of exercises, and the longer stories are always split at the same point. The words are 90-95% the same and 95% of the word order is the same. Some punctuation is changed. Some of these come from Plutarch or Ovid and the like, but I can't find the orgin for many of these tales.
The most charitable rationale I can come up with is that this is coincidence and these stories are coming from some common source of which I'm unaware. The least charitable rationale is that Moss has plagiarized Morice. Given the publication dates, it looks to me like Moss started assembling his book, and chose to lift a bunch of stories out of Morice. He made a few changes to these, but wasn't very subtle about what he was doing. I'm trying to figure out what's going on and readily admit that I might be missing something fundamental. I can provide what I've documented so far, but maybe nobody cares.
So, I have a couple of questions:
1) Am I missing something? Is there some rationale that makes this all innocent (except that I'm spending my time translating stuff I've already done, which is hardly the worst thing in the world)?
2) Is this worth pursuing? Is it worthwhile documenting where these books overlap? Can anything useful be made of this?
3) Is this something that's well known, or perhaps was acceptable at the time these books were written?
4) It has been 130 years. Does anyone care if Morice has plagiarized Moss or not?
5) What do people think about this?
Basically, I noticed this, investigated a little bit, began to document a strong pattern, and now I don't know what to do about it, so I came here. I'm interested in advice, both just whether this might be of interest to non-professional classics aficionados as well as professional scholars.
TIA.
In a couple of cases, specifically Morice's Morice's Stories in Attic Greek and Moss' A First Greek Reader, there is a LOT more overlap between these than I'd expect, or that I'd attribute to chance. Something is going on here, and I'm curious as to what.
Of course, we expect some overlap. It would be no surprise if anyone assembling such a book chose to adapt the first hundred words of Xenophon's Anabasis, so when that shows up more than once in these books that's no surprise. Similarly, some of these authors choose to adapt Aesop, and some of them will choose the same fables to adapt. I know Morice chose to do a free adaptation of a bunch of segments from Plutarch, and he took from Aelian and Pausanias with minor changes, so if someone else drew from the same sources, I'd also expect some overlap.
I'm going through Moss right now, and I've hit a segment were nearly everything is also found in Morice, published eight years earlier. Moss' stories numbered from the 60s to the 100s (and perhaps beyond, that's as far as I've gotten) all have nearly identical analogues in Morice, and in the same order (although with larger gaps between the similar selections in Morice than Moss.) In all cases, they are divided into the same number of exercises, and the longer stories are always split at the same point. The words are 90-95% the same and 95% of the word order is the same. Some punctuation is changed. Some of these come from Plutarch or Ovid and the like, but I can't find the orgin for many of these tales.
The most charitable rationale I can come up with is that this is coincidence and these stories are coming from some common source of which I'm unaware. The least charitable rationale is that Moss has plagiarized Morice. Given the publication dates, it looks to me like Moss started assembling his book, and chose to lift a bunch of stories out of Morice. He made a few changes to these, but wasn't very subtle about what he was doing. I'm trying to figure out what's going on and readily admit that I might be missing something fundamental. I can provide what I've documented so far, but maybe nobody cares.
So, I have a couple of questions:
1) Am I missing something? Is there some rationale that makes this all innocent (except that I'm spending my time translating stuff I've already done, which is hardly the worst thing in the world)?
2) Is this worth pursuing? Is it worthwhile documenting where these books overlap? Can anything useful be made of this?
3) Is this something that's well known, or perhaps was acceptable at the time these books were written?
4) It has been 130 years. Does anyone care if Morice has plagiarized Moss or not?
5) What do people think about this?
Basically, I noticed this, investigated a little bit, began to document a strong pattern, and now I don't know what to do about it, so I came here. I'm interested in advice, both just whether this might be of interest to non-professional classics aficionados as well as professional scholars.
TIA.