Re: VMs: Tironian Notes (examples posted)

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 18:11 26/11/2003 +0100, Petr Kazil wrote:
> This ancient stenography has been mentioned a lot of times, especially by
> Nick Pelling. It has no relevance to the VMS because:
> 1) it looks different
> 2) it went out of use in the 12th century or earlier.

To be precise, by the time of the 15th century only a handful of Tironian 
notae were still in use, and then often in a bastardised form. One 
manuscript uses (for example):-
        p-underscore    per-
        i-overscore     inter-
        u-overscore     -us
        &               et
        ch-overscore    che

However, the same Ms also seems to use (overscore) in many places as a way 
of indicating to the reader "this is a non-systematic abbreviation, so fill 
in the blank with whatever seems most obvious from context".

This kind of bastardised, localised, Northern Italian shorthand (though 
probably even more bastardised and localised) is what I suspect we will 
find to be the "plaintext" of the VMs. breaking the code will probably only 
be the first step of many... :-o

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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