

Scribal abbreviation - ivthreadp110
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation

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teilo
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.

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

~~~
kps
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/](http://folk.uib.no/hnooh/mufi/)

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chasing
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...

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

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

