Scribal abbreviation


Scribal abbreviations or sigla are the abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek, Old English and Old Norse. In modern manuscript editing "sigla" are the symbols used to indicate the source manuscript and to identify the copyists of a work. See Critical apparatus.

History

Abbreviated writing, using sigla, arose partly from the limitations of the workable nature of the materials employed in record-making and partly from their availability. Thus, lapidaries, engravers, and copyists made the most of the available writing space. Scribal abbreviations were infrequent when writing materials were plentiful, but by the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, writing materials were scarce and costly.
During the Roman Republic, several abbreviations, known as sigla, were in common use in inscriptions, and they increased in number during the Roman Empire. Additionally, in this period shorthand entered general usage. The earliest known Western shorthand system was that employed by the Greek historian Xenophon in the memoir of Socrates, and it was called notae socratae. In the late Roman Republic, the Tironian notes were developed possibly by Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero's amanuensis, in 63 BC to record information with fewer symbols; Tironian notes include a shorthand/syllabic alphabet notation different from the Latin minuscule hand and square and rustic capital letters. The notation was akin to modern stenographic writing systems. It used symbols for whole words or word roots and grammatical modifier marks, and it could be used to write either whole passages in shorthand or only certain words. In medieval times, the symbols to represent words were widely used; and the initial symbols, as few as 140 according to some sources, were increased to 14,000 by the Carolingians, who used them in conjunction with other abbreviations. However, the alphabet notation had a "murky existence", as it was often associated with witchcraft and magic, and it was eventually forgotten. Interest in it was rekindled by the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket in the 12th century and later in the 15th century, when it was rediscovered by Johannes Trithemius, abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Sponheim, in a psalm written entirely in Tironian shorthand and a Ciceronian lexicon, which was discovered in a Benedictine monastery.
To learn the Tironian note system, scribes required formal schooling in some 4,000 symbols; this later increased to some 5,000 symbols and then to some 13,000 in the medieval period ; the meanings of some characters remain uncertain. Sigla were mostly used in lapidary inscriptions; in some places and historical periods scribal abbreviations were overused to the extent that some are indecipherable.

Forms

The abbreviations were not constant but changed from region to region. Scribal abbreviations increased in usage and reached their height in the Carolingian Renaissance. The most common abbreviations, called notae communes, were used across most of Europe, but others appeared in certain regions. In legal documents, legal abbreviations, called notae juris, appear but also capricious abbreviations, which scribes manufactured ad hoc to avoid repeating names and places in a given document.
Scribal abbreviations can be found in epigraphy, sacred and legal manuscripts, written in Latin or in a vernacular tongue, either calligraphically or not.
In epigraphy, common abbreviations were comprehended in two observed classes:
Both forms of abbreviation are called "suspensions". A separate form of abbreviation is by "contraction" and was mostly a Christian usage for sacred words, Nomina Sacra; non-Christian sigla usage usually limited the number of letters the abbreviation comprised and omitted no intermediate letter. One practice was rendering an overused, formulaic phrase only as a siglum: DM for Dis Manibus ; IHS from the first three letters of "ΙΗΣΟΥΣ"; and RIP for requiescat in pace because the long-form written usage of the abbreviated phrase, by itself, was rare. According to Trabe, these abbreviations are not really meant to lighten the burden of the scribe but rather to shroud in reverent obscurity the holiest words of the Christian religion.
Another practice was repeating the abbreviation's final consonant a given number of times to indicate a group of as many persons: AVG denoted "Augustus", thus, AVGG denoted "Augusti duo"; however, lapidaries took typographic liberties with that rule, and instead of using COSS to denote "Consulibus duobus", they invented the CCSS form. Still, when occasion required referring to three or four persons, the complex doubling of the final consonant yielded to the simple plural siglum. To that effect, a vinculum above a letter or a letter-set also was so used, becoming a universal medieval typographic usage. Likewise the tilde, an undulated, curved-end line, came into standard late-medieval usage.
Besides the tilde and macron marks, above and below letters, modifying cross-bars and extended strokes were employed as scribal abbreviation marks, mostly for prefixes and verb, noun and adjective suffixes. The typographic abbreviations should not be confused with the phrasal abbreviations: i.e. ; loc. cit. ; viz. and et cetera.
Moreover, besides scribal abbreviations, ancient texts also contained variant typographic characters, including ligatures, the long s, and the half r, resembling an Arabic numeral two. The "u" and "v" characters originated as scribal variants for their respective letters, likewise the "i" and "j" pair. Modern publishers printing Latin-language works replace variant typography and sigla with full-form Latin spellings; the convention of using "u" and "i" for vowels and "v" and "j" for consonants is a late typographic development.

Scribal sigla in modern use

Latin script

Some ancient and medieval sigla are still used in English and other European languages; the Latin ampersand replaces the conjunction and in English, et in Latin and French, and y in Spanish. The Tironian sign ⁊, resembling the digit seven, represents the conjunction et and is written only to the x-height; in current Irish language usage, the siglum denotes the conjunction agus. Other scribal abbreviations in modern typographic use are the percentage sign, from the Italian per cento ; the permille sign, from the Italian per mille ; the pound sign and the dollar sign, which possibly derives from the Spanish word Peso. The commercial at symbol, originally denoting "at the rate/price of", is a ligature derived from the English preposition at; from the 1990s, its use outside commerce became widespread, as part of e-mail addresses.
Typographically, the ampersand, representing the word et, is a space-saving ligature of the letters "e" and "t", its component graphemes. Since the establishment of movable-type printing in the 15th century, founders have created many such ligatures for each set of record type to communicate much information with fewer symbols. Moreover, during the Renaissance, when Ancient Greek language manuscripts introduced that tongue to Western Europe, its scribal abbreviations were converted to ligatures in imitation of the Latin scribal writing to which readers were accustomed. Later, in the 16th century, when the culture of publishing included Europe's vernacular languages, Graeco-Roman scribal abbreviations disappeared, an ideologic deletion ascribed to the anti-Latinist Protestant Reformation.
The common abbreviation "Xmas," for Christmas, is a remnant of an old scribal abbreviation that substituted the Greek letter chi for the word Christ.

Church Slavonic

After the invention of printing, manuscript copying abbreviations continued to be employed in Church Slavonic and are still in use in printed books as well as on icons and inscriptions. Many common long roots and nouns describing sacred persons are abbreviated and written under the special diacritic symbol titlo, as shown in the figure at the right. That corresponds to the Nomina sacra tradition of using contractions for certain frequently-occurring names in Greek ecclesiastical texts. However, sigla for personal nouns are restricted to "good" beings and the same words, when referring to "bad" beings, are spelled out; for example, while "God" in the sense of the one true God is abbreviated as "", "god" referring to "false" gods is spelled out. Likewise, the word for "angel" is generally abbreviated as "", but the word for "angels" is spelled out for "performed by evil angels" in Psalm 77.

Abbreviation types

Adriano Cappelli's Lexicon Abbreviaturarum lists the various medieval brachigraphic signs found in Vulgar Latin and Italian texts, which originate from the Roman sigla, a symbol to express a word, and Tironian notes. Quite rarely, abbreviations did not carry marks to indicate that an abbreviation has occurred: if they did, they were often copying errors. For example, "e.g." is written with periods, but modern terms, such as "PC", may be written in uppercase.
The original manuscripts were not written in a modern sans-serif or serif font but in Roman capitals, rustic, uncial, insular, Carolingian or blackletter styles. For more, refer to Western calligraphy or a beginner's guide.
Additionally, the abbreviations employed varied across Europe. In Nordic texts, for instance, two runes were used in text written in the Latin alphabet, which are ᚠ for fé "cattle, goods" and ᛘ for maðr "man".
Cappelli divides abbreviations into six overlapping categories:
Suspended terms are those of which only the first part is written, and the last part is substituted by a mark, which can be of two types:
; General: indicating there has been an abbreviation but not how. The marks are placed above or across the ascender of the letters.
; Specific: indicating that a truncation has occurred.
The largest class of suspensions consists of single letters standing in for words that begin with that letter.
A dot at the baseline after a capital letter may stand for a title if it is used such as in front of names or a person's name in medieval legal documents. However, not all sigla use the beginning of the word.
For plural words, the siglum is often doubled: "F." = frater and "FF." = fratres. Tripled sigla often stand for three: "DDD" = domini tres.
Letters lying on their sides, or mirrored, often indicate female titles, but a mirrored C, Ↄ, stands generally for con or contra.
To avoid confusion with abbreviations and numerals, the latter are often written with a bar above. In some contexts, however, numbers with a line above indicate that number is to be multiplied by a thousand, and several other abbreviations also have a line above them, such as "ΧΡ" = Christus or "IHS" = Jesus.
Starting in the 8th or the 9th century, single letter sigla grew less common and were replaced by longer, less-ambiguous sigla, with bars above them.

Contraction

Abbreviations by contraction have one or more middle letters omitted. They were often represented with a general mark of abbreviation, such as a line above. They can be divided into two subtypes:
; pure: a pure contraction keeps only the first and last letters but not intermediate letters. Special cases arise when a contraction keeps only the first and last letter of a word, resulting in a two-letter sigla.
; mixed : a mixed contraction keeps one or more intermediate letters of the word that is abridged.

Marks with independent meaning

Such marks inform the reader of the identity of the missing part of the word without affecting the meaning. Some of them may be interpreted as alternative contextual glyphs of their respective letters.
The meaning of the marks depends on the letter on which they appear.
A superscript letter generally referred to the letter omitted, but, in some instances, as in the case of vowel letters, it could refer to a missing vowel combined with the letter r, before or after it. It is only in some English dialects that the letter r before another consonant largely silent and the preceding vowel is "r-coloured".
However, a, i, and o above g meant gͣ gna, gͥ gni and gͦ gno respectively. Although in English, the g is silent in gn, but in other languages, it is pronounced. Vowel letters above q meant qu + vowel: qͣ, qͤ, qͥ, qͦ, qͧ.
Vowels were the most common superscripts, but consonants could be placed above letters without ascenders; the most common were c, e.g. nͨ. A cut l above an n, nᷝ, meant nihil for instance.

Convention marks

These marks are nonalphabetic letters carrying a particular meaning. Several of them continue in modern usage, as in the case of monetary symbols. In Unicode, they are referred to as letter-like glyphs. Additionally, several authors are of the view that the Roman numerals themselves were, for example, nothing less than abbreviations of the words for those numbers. Other examples of symbols still in some use are alchemical and zodiac symbols, which were, in any case, employed only in alchemy and astrology texts, which made their appearance beyond that special context rare.

Other

In addition to the signs used to signify abbreviations, medieval manuscripts feature some glyphs that are now uncommon but were not sigla.
Many more ligatures were used to reduce the space occupied, a characteristic that is particularly prominent in blackletter scripts.
Some :Category:Palaeographic letter variants|letter variants such as r rotunda, long s and uncial or insular variants, Claudian letters were in common use, as well as letters derived from other scripts such as Nordic runes: thorn and eth.
An illuminated manuscript would feature miniatures, decorated initials or littera notabilior, which later resulted in the bicamerality of the script.

Typographic replication

Various typefaces have been designed to allow scribal abbreviations and other archaic glyphs to be replicated in print. They include "record type", which was first developed in the 1770s to publish Domesday Book and was fairly widely used for the publication of medieval records in Britain until the end of the 19th century.

Unicode encoding

In the Unicode Standard , 152 medieval and classical glyphs were given specific locations outside of the Private Use Area. Specifically, they are located in the charts , , , and especially .
These consist in both precomposed characters and modifiers for other characters, called combining diacritical marks.
Characters are "the smallest components of written language that have semantic value" but glyphs are "the shapes that characters can have when they are rendered or displayed".
SymbolsCode points
U+A73E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER REVERSED C WITH DOT
U+A73F LATIN SMALL LETTER REVERSED C WITH DOT
U+A76E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER CON
U+A76F LATIN SMALL LETTER CON
U+A770 MODIFIER LETTER US
U+A771 LATIN SMALL LETTER DUM
U+A76A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ET
U+A76B LATIN SMALL LETTER ET
U+A76C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER IS
U+A76D LATIN SMALL LETTER IS
U+A742 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K WITH DIAGONAL STROKE
U+A743 LATIN SMALL LETTER K WITH DIAGONAL STROKE
U+A740 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K WITH STROKE
U+A741 LATIN SMALL LETTER K WITH STROKE
U+A744 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K WITH STROKE AND DIAGONAL STROKE
U+A745 LATIN SMALL LETTER K WITH STROKE AND DIAGONAL STROKE
U+A748 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH HIGH STROKE
U+A749 LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH HIGH STROKE
U+A772 LATIN SMALL LETTER LUM
U+A773 LATIN SMALL LETTER MUM
U+A774 LATIN SMALL LETTER NUM
U+A74A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH LONG STROKE OVERLAY
U+A74B LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH LONG STROKE OVERLAY
U+A752 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P WITH FLOURISH
U+A753 LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH FLOURISH
U+A754 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P WITH SQUIRREL TAIL
U+A755 LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH SQUIRREL TAIL
U+A750 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P WITH STROKE THROUGH DESCENDER
U+A751 LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH STROKE THROUGH DESCENDER
U+A758 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q WITH DIAGONAL STROKE
U+A759 LATIN SMALL LETTER Q WITH DIAGONAL STROKE
U+A756 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q WITH STROKE THROUGH DESCENDER
U+A757 LATIN SMALL LETTER Q WITH STROKE THROUGH DESCENDER
U+A775 LATIN SMALL LETTER RUM
U+A776 LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL RUM
U+A75C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER RUM ROTUNDA
U+A75D LATIN SMALL LETTER RUM ROTUNDA
U+1E9C LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S WITH DIAGONAL STROKE
U+1E9D LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S WITH HIGH STROKE
U+A777 LATIN SMALL LETTER TUM
U+A778 LATIN SMALL LETTER UM
U+A75E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V WITH DIAGONAL STROKE
U+A75F LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH DIAGONAL STROKE
U+A764 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE
U+A765 LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE
U+A766 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE THROUGH DESCENDER
U+A767 LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE THROUGH DESCENDER

Examples of 8th- and 9th-century Latin abbreviations across Europe

Citations