The Spelling of Homophonous Morphemes: Scribal Corrections of 〈Ο, Ω〉 in Greek Documentary Papyri

Interchanges of , are commonly found in Greek documentary papyri and some of them were even corrected by the ancient scribes.In this paper I show that the majority of those corrections affected the interchange of , in morphemes, such as confusion between the case endings of the second declension in -/- and -/- and the suffix vowel of the oblique cases of the -, -, -, -stems of the third declension.Correction may be prompted by a change of mind on the exact formulation of the phrase, adapting the choice of morphemes accordingly, or a result of contemporary variation in spelling within the paradigm of the third declension.For the second declension endings, I argue that the later correction of homophonous morphemes by the scribes themselves indicates that these interchanges were not due to poor spelling skills but were rather a result of cognitive limitations during language processing, as has also been shown for spelling errors to grammatical homophones in modern languages.