originally oral is without doubt the point at which they were written down,
for then the wording becomes fixed and is no longer readily alterable. At
this stage it usually happens that they not only lose their self-sufficiency
but nearly always change their literary type as a result of losing previous
characteristics of form.27 When the oral tradition was written down the
writer changed the text according to his language and time. Koch says:
"They added explanatory details, perhaps chronological, or geographical.
They provided the text with a central theme, thus giving it unity. This was
what the first writers accomplished.28 Later editors worked in a similar
way till the text gained its final shape. Koch writes: "Redaction history
therefore follows the work of both the first writer and the subsequent
redactors. It traces the path the unit has taken from the time it was first
written down until the time it achieved its final literary form. Therefore,
whenever the written transmission of units is reckoned to have been
long, the study of its redaction history is essential. In fact, any text which calls
for a study of its transmission inevitably requires a study of its redaction
also.29 The form critical analysis comes to an end when the redaction
history is studied exhaustively. Koch say: 'By tracing the redaction history
of a linguistic unit we follow the changes that take place within it when it
was written down, its subsequent redaction, until it reaches its final form.30
In the postscript to the 4th edition of his book on the form-critical
method Klaus Koch shows the linguistic consequences of this method:
"Linguistic surveys confirm form-critical results and develop them
further...but they also question them to a great extent.31 The further
development Koch says, may end up in a theory of language, eg a
theological theory of language (Which is not yet existent). This leads me
to the conclusion that it may respectively end up in an itihasic theory of
language or in a novel theory of language etc.
Koch deals with usage of language(parole) and individual language
as linguistic competence(langue). He quotes Ferdinand de Saussure who
taught in Geneva in the beginning of this century and who gave a new
orientation to the science of linguistics. Saussure distinguished the real
usage of language (parole) in a speech or a text from the background of the
total linguistic material of an individual language(langue). Koch deduces
that a speech or a text can be examined in two ways: firstly, as linear chains
running chronologically, i.e. the syntagmatic method; secondly in regar-
ding each part of a linguistic unit within references and associations of the
speaker(writer) and the listener(reader), i.e., the paradigmatic method. In
the paradigmatic method words of the same part of speech are compared
with words with related or opposite meanings. Therefore there is no ling-
uistic chain but an associative field. Nowadays the science of linguistics
31
