Information AboutPalaeography |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT PALAEOGRAPHY | |
| palaeography | |
| papyrology | |
| writingpalaeography | |
| papyrology | |
| writing | |
| writing | |
| philology | |
| uncommon latin letters | |
|
Palaeography is in many ways a prerequisite for , Gothic , etc.), it is necessary to know how to decipher the characters that constitute a manuscript. Secondly, these manuscripts carry by necessity many abbreviations for the purpose of saving space—since each page was made from the skin of one sheep, one had to have a sizable flock just to produce a Bible , even an abridged one. The palaeographer must thus know the relevant Abbreviation s. The & sign, for example, originated from one of these abbreviations, as did the Tilde . This information, about the characters and the abbreviations, permits the palaegrapher to ''transcribe'' the document, that is, to produce a modern edition, reestablishing the abbreviations. This task is particularly important for transcribing texts in Latin , because the abbreviations frequently occur at the ends of words, and the Declension of the Latin noun requires the usage of different endings. HISTORY Ancient paleography Medieval paleography When the Roman Empire collapsed in the 4th Century , Europe was taken over by mostly Illiterate Germanic Peoples ; the Ostrogoths ruled Italy , the Visigoths took over Spain and southern France , the Franks settled in central and northern France and the Anglo-Saxons overran the Celts in Great Britain . The Catholic Church took on the task of converting the Germanic tribes to Christianity and educating them, and over time each group developed its own Roman-based, but unique, system of handwriting. These developed into the National Hands of Spain, Italy, France, and the British Isles. Prior to the time of Charlemagne several parts of Europe even had their own handwriting style. His rule over a large part of the continent provided an opportunity to unify these writing styles in the hand called Carolingian Minuscule . To over-simplify, the only scripts to escape this modernization were the Visigothic (or Mozarabic), which survived into the twelfth or thirteenth century, the Beneventan , which was still being written in the middle of the sixteenth century, and the one that continues to be used in traditional Irish handwriting, which has been in severe decline since the early 20th Century and is now almost extinct. The printed form was abolished by the Irish Government in the 1950s . In Germany, the Sütterlin , a handwriting counterpart to the Blackletter typefaces, was taught in schools in some areas until the 1970s ; it is no longer being taught. SEE ALSO
EXTERNAL LINKS
FURTHER READING
|
|
|