Scribal abbreviation

en.wikipedia.org

6 points·ivthreadp110··6 comments

I do transcribing of old manuscripts. The first time I ran into Scribal abbreviation was on the first printing (1519) of the parallel Greek / Latin New Testament of Erasmus von Rotterdam. It turns out that many printers had taken to adopting scribal abbreviations as ligatures in order to save ink and paper.

It was very frustrating, as at that time finding information on these ligatures was difficult at best. I had to work out most of it on my own.

How many of these can you faithfully represent in modern character sets? How do you capture this information in its raw form?

Actually, I don't represent the ligatures themselves in modern character sets. I transcribe them into the set of characters they represent. In the end, everything ends up in standard Latin or Greek Unicode.

It is theoretically possible to design fonts that convert sequences of characters into ligatures that look like the scribal abbreviations, but I see no value in that. The point is to make the material accessible and searchable in electronic form, not to create a one-to-one facsimile.

Those that aren't in Unicode are often coordinated in a Private Use Area by the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative¹, which periodically makes proposals to add characters to the standard.

¹ http://folk.uib.no/hnooh/mufi/

Sometimes I would just like a little context as to why a link to a seemingly random Wikipedia page has hit the front page of Hacker News...

I expect it is because of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8113410 (Medieval Manuscripts online).

This article exposed folks to the images of the manuscripts, which use the abbreviations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com