urtext

Noun

urtext (plural urtexts or urtexte)

1. A primitive, seminal, or prototypical example of an artistic genre or the basis of an ideological movement.
   • Nearly coinciding with the publication of Thomas’s work was what, in many ways, stands as the ur-text of Turkish denialist “scholarship”: Esat Uras’s Tarihte Ermeniler ve Ermeni Meselesi. Uras, born Ahmed Essad, was an important figure in the CUP administration and was heavily involved in the...2015, Marc Mamigonian, “Academic Denial of the Armenian Genocide in American Scholarship: Denialism as Manufactured Controversy”, in Genocide Studies International, volume 9, number 1, →DOI, pages...
   • The Weekly Standard ran an interminable series of essays lauding manliness and lamenting its demise at the hands of liberalism. Perhaps the Ur-text of this movement was a 2003 Jay Nordlinger op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.2016 May 16, Jonathan Chait, “How Trump Has Revived the Republican Cult of Manliness”, in NYMag, archived from the original on 04 Sep 2017
2. The original version of a piece of music or text, often as created by the composer or writer.
   • The recensional variation found in some tractates suggests the possibility that at an early stage of the – oral (?) – transmission there was no urtext, or that passages not stemming from the urtext entered into the text at this time.2020, Chaim Milikowsky, “7.6 Philological practices: Hebrew”, in Philipp Roelli, editor, Handbook of Stemmatology: History, Methodology, Digital Approaches, De Gruyter, →DOI, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC...

   Synonyms:

   original, manuscript