NK - Fwd: Homework Help! Primary Vs. Secondary sources.

I. Marc Carlson LIB_IMC at centum.utulsa.edu
Tue Nov 24 15:35:57 PST 1998

<Vanessa Goins <delbosque at rocketmail.com>>
>Yes it does, very much.  The trouble is this means in essence that
>almost nobody can go back and look at the "actual" sources of
>antiquity.  If they are edited by someone else, or if it is a
>re-publication (dated later than the original), or is a translation of
>said work then it's also secondary?

Yup.  Unless you can go to a real live, honest to goodness original 
document (the epic of Gilgamesh, your birth certificate, the 1973
Tulsa city directory, the Bible, whatever), you are going to have to 
rely on the fact that whoever translated it, edited it, copied it, 
photocopied it, whatever, didn't change it.  This is why primary 
sources are so precious. 


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