Lacuna (manuscripts)

As Lacuna (Latin: " depression, hole, gap," also lacuna ) is referred to in the scholarly editing and text science an actually existing or inferred from problems of the text gap in the tradition of a text that can have various causes, such as the mechanical destruction of a part of the text, the loss of individual leaves, jumping a copyist of a word to his next or any subsequent occurrences in the text ( saut du même au même [ French: "Jump from the same to the same " ]) or the haplography. Ancient inscriptions and papyri have, because of their condition often lacunae of individual letters, words, as well as larger pieces of text on manuscripts that have been passed on the way to the medieval tradition, less often.