A Syriac Chrestomathy

work_note

Codex: cod. Vat. syr. 148 (a. Chr. 1267) - Nestle's sub-head is 3) e Cod. Vat. syr. 148 (a. Chr. 1267)., and under it a second bracketed line that changes what this sub-piece IS: [ex explanatione officiorum ecclesiasticorum a Georgio Arbelensi conscripta.] (I, 24.). ⭐ So IV.3 is not a third recension of the legend: it is an excerpt from George of Arbela's Expositio officiorum ecclesiae, book I ch. 24, which quotes the Finding of the Cross. Nestle changed WORKS here, not merely witnesses - a bigger version of Chrest. I's switch to cod. Ambrosianus, and the reason work for these five pages names George of Arbela. IV.3 = 92 lines over pp. 127-131. No folio markers at all - Nestle cites Vat. syr. 148 by neither folio nor column anywhere in the five pages; the only apparatus is his own footnotes and in-text parentheses, both of which IV.1 and IV.2 entirely lack.

⚑ De sancta cruce does NOT contain this sub-piece, so nothing here is affected by Nestle's corrigenda in that book (which in any case belong to a different manuscript altogether - see the IV.1/IV.2 records).

layer_note

Declared from this plate, not from Phase 0's note and not from the neighbouring page. The whole of Chrestomathia IV - all 24 pages, all three codices - sits at the unvocalized-Serto pole and never leaves it: not one vowel point on any page. What the plates do carry is seyame on plurals, the letter points (dalath/rish, and the qushshaya/rukkakha and participle points), a linea occultans over elided letters, and the ܂ / ܆ / ❖ punctuation. ⭐ So Chrest. IV settles the layer table's third case. Chrest. I alternates by caput (Serto / Estrangela / Serto / Estrangela) and puts two layers on three pages; Chrest. II is unvocalized Estrangela throughout; Chrest. IV is unvocalized SERTO throughout - the same vocalisation state as Chrest. II but the other script. Script and pointing are two independent axes and this piece is the proof; a layer field that treats them as one string will keep colliding.

diff_target

NONE - see [alignment].diff. De sancta cruce contains only sub-pieces 1) and 2) of section B; there is no 3) in it and the strings 'Vat', '148' and '1267' do not occur in desanctacruceein0000nest_djvu.txt at all. Chrestomathia IV.3 is the one part of Chrest. IV with NO control of any strength. See research/syriac-peshitta-editions.md

layer_source_note

seyame and the letter points are visible at the plate's own resolution and are reported; individual qushshaya/rukkakha points are NOT itemised (below the resolution at which this pass can be honest about them - a known gap, not a claim the plate lacks them).

line_numbers

Marginal, every fifth line, in the OUTER margin (left on versos, right on rectos) - verified on this plate. ⭐ The numbering is per sub-piece and restarts at each codex: IV.1 runs 1-101, IV.2 restarts at 1 and runs to 274, IV.3 restarts at 1 and runs to 92. A reader who takes the marginals as one series across Chrest. IV will mis-locate every line from p. 113 on. This page: 40, 45, 50 - RIGHT margin (recto, outer). Line range 37-54. ⚑ Page line-ranges here are derived from the PRINTED marginals, not from a row count: on each page a marginal numeral pins one row to an absolute line number, and the next page's first marginal pins the page's last line. Every boundary in pp. 108-131 closes without a gap or an overlap.

transcription_note

⛔ DELIBERATE NON-TRANSCRIPTION, not a failed plate fetch. Reasons, in order:

1. Unvocalized Serto carrying an unknown text. R3(a) worked because it keyed texts it already knew (Genesis, Matt. 5) and then checked them, and because Chrest. I is VOCALIZED Serto, where the points disambiguate the skeleton. Chrest. IV is unvocalized Serto carrying a legend for which no digital edition exists anywhere (ruled 2026-09-01, research/syriac-peshitta-editions.md). Nothing primes the read; every word is a cold glyph-by-glyph decision. 2. The master scan is 1586 x 2512 px. Checked 2026-09-01: page/nNNN.jpg, the same URL with ?scale=0/1/2, and the _jp2.zip member all return that identical size, so there is no higher-resolution copy of this scan to escalate to. Serto pairs that differ by one hook or one dot (dalath/rish, the yud/shin/semkath peaks, medial nun vs. lamadh vs. alaph) sit at the edge of it; past ~2.5x the enlargement is interpolation, not information. 3. The house rule forbids the alternative. [[reference_arabic-control-rule]] and SYRIAC-LANGUAGE-PILOT.md §5/§8: never read codepoints by eye; an extractor that is unsure flags rather than extracting "to be safe". A confidently wrong Syriac line is worse than a blank one. 4. Keying from the diff target would poison the diff. De sancta cruce is the clearer of the two settings (1726 px scan, larger type on the page). Keying from IT and then "diffing" against the Grammatik would make the agreement an artefact of the method - the circularity R3(a) refused when it declined to peek at BFBS for Matt. 5:5.

⭐ What is owed here is a reader with Syriac, or a Serto-trained HTR model, working from De sancta cruce and the Grammatik side by side. Everything else in this record - line numbering, the folio/column collation, the codex boundaries, the footnote apparatus, the De sancta cruce line-for-line correspondence, the corrigenda ruling - is done and does not need redoing.

text_syr_voc

⛔ NOT READ - the Syriac of this page is deliberately not transcribed (see transcription_note). The line inventory below is what the plate does license: one entry per printed line, with the line's number in the piece's own marginal series and anything on that line that is not Syriac.

Line inventory: line 40: marginal numeral 40 printed line 45: marginal numeral 45 printed; superscript footnote siglum a line 50: marginal numeral 50 printed line 51: in-text parenthesis (ܕ) with a superscript footnote siglum b line 53: in-text parenthesis (ܘ) with a superscript footnote siglum b

primer_notes

⭐ Chrest. IV.3 is the ONLY part of Chrest. IV that carries Nestle's own footnotes - IV.1 and IV.2 (pp. 108-126) have none at all. They are set below a short rule at the foot of the page, keyed by superscript Latin letters in the text, and they are codicological notes on Vat. syr. 148 rather than textual variants. IV.3 also carries editorial parentheses INSIDE the Syriac line - (corr. …) and bare (…) supplements - which the other two sub-pieces never use. ⚑ The line numbers given for the in-text sigla in the inventory are read off row positions and are good to about ±1; the footnote TEXT below is read directly and is exact.

Two footnotes at the foot of the page, below a rule: a ܝ erasum. b inclusa a secunda manu. (The a note carries a single Syriac letter as its lemma - Nestle reporting an erased yud.) Foot of page also carries the signature line Nestle. and the gathering signature I.