Imagine that you receive a document.
Unfortunately, this document has been chewed by a dog leaving various holes in
the paper. Some of the holes are larger than others. Some pages are torn. All
of them are damaged. You would be able to read much of the text, but there
would be portions where you would find it difficult to fill in the blanks in
the paper. This is the situation that scholars find themselves in when dealing
with a fragmentary text.
Reading fragmentary manuscripts presents a challenge for
scholars. Some lacunae are small and obliterate only a part of a letter. Most
lacunae that only cover part of a letter create no problems for the reader.
Sometimes, the lacuna will remove enough of a letter that more than one letter
could be represented by the traces. Usually, though not always, in those cases
one can determine the letter from the remaining letters of the word. Lacunae,
however, might be extensive and leave whole lines or pages missing.
Sometimes a scholar can use his knowledge to reconstruct the
text. The more extensive the text, the less likely that a scholar will be able
to supply a possible text.