Scribal abbreviations, or sigla (: ), are abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek, Old English and Old Norse.
In modern manuscript editing (substantive and mechanical) sigla are the symbols used to indicate the source manuscript (e.g. variations in text between different such manuscripts).
History Abbreviated writing, using sigla, arose partly from the limitations of the workable nature of the materials (stone, metal, parchment, etc.) 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 (plural of siglum 'symbol or abbreviation'), 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 . 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" (C. Burnett), 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 (4th to 15th centuries AD); the meanings of some characters remain uncertain. Sigla were mostly used in lapidary inscriptions; in some places and historical periods (such as medieval Spain) scribal abbreviations were overused to the extent that some are indecipherable.
Middle English
In Middle English, the word the (written þe) was frequently abbreviated as , a (thorn) with a small written as a diacritic. Similarly, the word that was abbreviated to , a with a small written as a diacritic. During the latter Middle English and Early Modern English periods, the thorn in its common script, or cursive, form came to resemble a shape. With the arrival of movable type printing, the substitution of for became ubiquitous, leading to the common "ye", as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. (One major reason for this was that existed in the printer's types that William Caxton and his contemporaries imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while did not.)
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 (8th to 10th centuries). The most common abbreviations, called , were used across most of Europe, but others appeared in certain regions. In legal documents, legal abbreviations, called , appear but also capricious abbreviations, which scribes manufactured ad hoc to avoid repeating names and places in a given document.Lindsay, Wallace Martin, Notae Latinae: An Account of Abbreviation in Latin Mss. Of the Early Minuscule Period (C. 700–850), 1915, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Scribal abbreviations can be found in epigraphy, sacred and legal manuscripts, written in Latin or in a vernacular tongue (but less frequently and with fewer abbreviations), either calligraphically or not.
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, from throughout the word.
Both forms of abbreviation are called suspensions (as the scribe suspends the writing of the word). A separate form of abbreviation is by contraction and was mostly a Christian usage for sacred words, or ; 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 ('Dedicated to the Manes'); IHS from the first three letters of ; and RIP for ('rest in peace')) because the long-form written usage of the abbreviated phrase, by itself, was rare. According to Traube, 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.Traube, Ludwig, Nomina sacra: Versuch einer Geschichte der Christlichen Kürzung, Munich,1907
Another practice was repeating the abbreviation's final consonant a given number of times to indicate a group of as many persons: denoted , thus, denoted ; however, lapidaries took typographic liberties with that rule, and instead of using to denote , they invented the 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, 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. ( 'that is'); loc. cit. ( 'in the passage already cited'); viz. ( 'namely; that is to say; in other words' – formed with vi + the yogh-like glyph ꝫ, the siglum for the suffix -et and the conjunction ); and etc. (et cetera 'and so on').
Moreover, besides scribal abbreviations, ancient texts also contained variant typographic characters, including ligatures (Æ, Œ, etc.), the long s (ſ), and the r rotunda (ꝛ). 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, in Latin and French, and in Spanish (but its use in Spanish is frowned upon, since the y is already smaller and easier to write). The Tironian et character (superficially 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 ('and'). Other scribal abbreviations in modern typographic use are the percentage sign (%), from the Italian ('per hundred'); the permille sign (‰); from the Italian ('per thousand'); the pound sign (₤, £ and #, all descending from or lb for ) and the dollar sign ($), which possibly derives from the Spanish word . The at sign (@), originally denoting 'at the rate/price of', is possibly an abbreviation of the word arroba or amphora— units of trade; 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 (font) to communicate much information with fewer symbols. Moreover, during the Renaissance (14th to 17th centuries), 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 (1517–1648).
The common abbreviation Xmas, for Christmas, is a remnant of an old scribal abbreviation that substituted the Greek letter chi (Χ) for Christ's name (deriving from the first letter in his name, ).
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 ('Sacred names') 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 meaning 'angel' is generally abbreviated as , but the word meaning 'angels' is spelled out for 'performed by evil angels' in Psalm 77.
Abbreviation types 's 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 fé (ᚠ 'cattle, goods') and maðr (ᛘ 'man').
divides abbreviations into six overlapping categories: by suspension () by contraction () with independent meaning () with relative meaning () by superscript letters () by convention ()
Suspension
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.
The final three of the series are knot-like and are used in papal or regal documents. Specific indicating that a truncation has occurred.