Scribal abbreviation
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Scribal abbreviations (sigla [plural], siglum and sigil [singular]) are the abbreviations used by ancient and mediæval scribes writing in Latin and, later, in Greek. Modern manuscript editing (substantive and mechanical) employs sigla as symbols indicating the location of a source manuscript and to identify the copyist(s) of a work.
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[edit] History
Abbreviated writing, via sigla, arose partly from the exigencies of the workable nature of the materials — stone, metal, parchment, et cetera — employed in records-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, consequently, scribes recorded texts in long form, however, by the third and fourth centuries AD, when writing materials were scarce and costly, the scribe-artists became sparing in their use of the limited writing surface when inscribing long texts to record.
To wit, the Romans created the notae Tironianae short-hand alphabet (the “Tironian notes”, ascribed to Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero’s amanuensis) for comprehending much information with few symbols; it is akin to contemporary stenographic writing systems. To learn the Tironian note alphabet, scribes required formal schooling in some 4,000 symbols; by the Classical period (ca.7th c. BC–AD 5th c.), the number increased to some 5,000 symbols, then to some 13,000 in the mediæval period (AD 4th–15th c.); to date, the denotations of some characters remain uncertain. Sigla are mostly for lapidary inscription; in certain late historical periods (e.g. mediæval Spain), scribal abbreviations were over-used to the extent that some are indecipherable.
Moreover, in the twenty-first century, sigla are a public matter, because, in re-establishing post–Devolution Scots law, the Scottish Parliament must decipher their meaning(s) as used in the old, Latin-language Scottish law codes. Latinists who did not learn the palaeography of the language cannot decipher many of the thirteen thousand mediæval sigla used to write said laws.
[edit] Forms
In epigraphy, common abbreviations were comprehended in two observed classes:
- The abbreviation of a word to its initial letter;
- The abbreviation of a word to its first consecutive letters, or to several letters, spaced in the word.
The second class of scribal abbreviations was mostly a Christian usage; non-Christian sigla usage usually limited the number of letters the abbreviation comprised, and omitted no intermediate letter. One practice was rendering an over-used, formulaic phrase only as a siglum, e.g. DM for Dis Manibus (“Dedicated to the Manes”); IHS from the first three letters of "ΙΗΣΟΥΣ" ; and RIP for requiescat in pace (“Rest in Peace”), because the long-form written usage of the abbreviated phrase, itself, was rare.
Another practice was repeating the abbreviation’s final consonant a given number of times to indicate a group of as many persons, for example: 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”, 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 (overbar) above a letter or a letter-set also was so used, ’til becoming universal mediæval typographic usage. Like-wise, using a tilde (~) , an undulated, curved-end line, became standard late-mediæval usage.
Besides the tilde and macron marks, above and below letters, modifying cross-bars and extended strokes were employed as scribal abbreviation marks — used mostly for prefixes and verb, noun, and adjectival suffixes. These typographic abbreviations mustn’t be confused with the phrasal abbreviations: i.e. (id est — “that is”); loc. cit. (loco citato — “in the passage already cited”); viz. (vide licet — “namely”, “that is to say”, “in other words” — formed with “vi” and the yogh-like glyph [Ȝ], the siglum for the suffix -et and the conjunction et), and et cetera.
Moreover, besides scribal abbreviations, ancient texts also contain variant typographic characters, including digraphs (e.g. Æ, Œ, etc.), the long s (ſ), and the half r, resembling an Arabic number three (“3”). The “u” and “v” characters originated as scribal variants for their respective letters, like-wise the “i” and “j” pair. Contemporary 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.
[edit] Scribal sigla in contemporary use
Ancient and mediæval sigla remain contemporary usages in English and other European languages; the Latin ampersand (&), replaces the conjunctions and in English, y in Spanish, and et in Latin and French. The Tironian sign ⁊, resembling the Arabic number seven (“7”), represents the conjunction et , and is written only to the x-height; in current Irish language usage, this siglum denotes the conjunction and. Other scribal abbreviations in contemporary typographic use are: the percentage sign (%), from the Italian per cento (“per hundred”); the permille sign (‰), from the Italian per mille (“per thousand”); the pound sign (₤ librum, later £ in the UK); and the dollar sign ($); while the commercial at symbol (@), denoting “at the rate of”, is a ligature derived from the preposition at.
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 fifteenth century, founders created many such ligatures for each set of record type (font) in order to communicate much information with fewer symbols. Moreover, during the Renaissance (ca.14th–17th c.), 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 sixteenth century, when the culture of publishing included Europe’s vernacular languages, Græco–Roman scribal abbreviations disappeared — an ideologic deletion ascribed to the anti-Latinist Protestant Reformation (1517–1648).
[edit] External links
- Bibliography on medieval abbreviations and other scribal conventions.
- Paleography: Scribal Abbreviations
- XML Specifications for the use of sigla
This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.
