ffolliott

[Mark Mandel]

OMG. I remember doing a paper on the Beneventan script in grad school, in
archeography(?), under the tutelage of Dr. Madeline Pelner Cosman at CCNY.

Blasted by the past!

m a m

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Amy West <medievalist at w-sts.com> wrote:

> >This sounds quite similar to a symbol found in the New Plymouth
> >records.  It can be described as looking like an "e" with a long
> >curved tail, and it stands for "es".  Such things were abbreviation
> >forms a bit like modern shorthand, to allow scribes to write more
> >quickly (as needed for court records, I suppose).
>
> They're called ligatures, like & for "et". Ligatures are used in both
> cursive and non-cursive scripts. Chancery cursives are notorious for
> their difficulty in reading not only because of ligatures,
> abbreviations, marks of suspensions, Tironian notes, and the like
> (which are found in other scripts as well but not in the same
> amount), but also because the ductus is often cramped and even
> non-ligatured letters are run together or otherwise all
> smooshy-looking. Chancery cursive is found not only in court records
> but account books and other utilitarian rolls where, yes, speed and
> brevity is of the essence, and the person who's going to be reading
> it is trained to make heads and tails out of it.
>
> ---Pedantic Amy West
>
> (The script I hated to read the most was Beneventan, which isn't a
> cursive script, but because all the bows of the letters are smooshed
> together, the cross members of the letters all run together into a
> single horizontal line with a bunch of bows below. It looks like
> Sanskrit to me.)
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org