Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 11.djvu/449

 PALEOGRAPHY

405

PALAEOGRAPHY

The first printers adopted tliis minuscule character for their type. Until tlie eighteenth century books printed in Greek retained a part of the ligatures and a large number of the abbreviations of the minuscule of the IMSS. It was also adopted by imperial or episcopal chanceries for copying diplomas.

Abbreviations. — In Greek handwriting two sorts of abbreviations are to be distinguished. (1) Those of religious MSS. are the most ancient, being found in uncial MSS. and transmitted by tradition to the minuscule. The abbreviation is effected by the sup- pression of vowels and indicated by a bar. The nouns thus abbreviated were those having a religious character.

0Z erfs

0KOZ

l€poviTa\ri/x

1 ni\'l<rfia^\

ludl'VT]^

(2) In minuscule MSS. abbreviations are made by interrupting the word and cutting off the last letter with a transverse line. For the reader's assistance the scribe retained the characteristic consonance of the last syllable. These abbreviations, tables of which will be found in the works of Montfaucon and Gardthausen, are by far the most numerous and in- crease from the beginning of the thirteenth century. Examples : —

archaic letters are made use of. C (<^:\ — C From 1000 the same letters^ ^ ' ^ are used with accents written ^ {{cofiha.'^ ~ 40 beneath. Arabic numerals " ^ 1 1 ^ ~ • reached the Greeks through J\ / .\

the West, and do not appear K/ U^mljtls ^00 in MSS. before the fifteenth ' •'

century. Dates, according to the era of the Creation of the World, are written in letters.

National and Provincial Writings. — Owing to the unity of culture which prevailed throughout the ter- ritory subject to the Greek Church, there is no marked difference between the MSS. copied at Constantinople and those which originated in the provinces. Mgr Batiffol considers the minuscule in the MSS. of South- ern Italy (Abbey of Rossano) as but slightly different from that of Constantinople; but his conclusions have been opposed by Gardthausen (Byzant. Zeit., XV, 236), who .sees here simjily the difference between the work of disciples and that of masters. The same scholar has .studied, at Sinai, Greek MSS. copied in Armenia or Georgia in the thirteenth century, and has found their w-riting the same as that of Constanti- nople. In the West the national writings, as they are called, disappeared before the Carlovingian minuscule, and in the East the influence of the Greek Church was such as to prevent the formation of provincial hand- writing. In the W^est, where the monks sometimes copied Greek MSS. and edited bilingual glosses (see Miller, "Glossaire Gr6co-latine de Laon", notices and extracts from MSS., 29, 2), the Greek writing is fre-

quently awkward or irregular, but, far ,'. ^3, - Jm/^'^n scrupulously transcribe the characters

Abbreviations by superscribed letters are also found:-

€ (cm), a ((xtto), (Xv^ (oivTi^.

Among the abbreviated endings may be cited: —

which the MSS. copied by the Greeks offered as models.

It was quite otherwise with alphabets derived from the Greek and applied to foreign languages. Created under the influence of the Greek Church, but adapted to a vocabulary very different from the Greek, they became truly national writings. Such is the charac- ter adopted by the Copts, which resembles Greek writing, and is merely a transformation

(9'(o?'),?rw

Some conventional signs (found tabulated in Gard- thausen, op. cit.. p. 259) are veritable hieroglyphics; they are used chiefly in astrological or chemical treatises. The moon is designated by a crescent, the sea by three undulating lines, etc. (see Wiedmann, " Byzantinische Zeitschrift", XIX, 144). Lastly, the Greeks, like the Latins, knew a tachygraphical char- acter in which syllables were represented by signs. Several of these tachygraphical signs, indicating end- ings, parts of the verb "to be", etc., are transferred to the minuscule, and some recur in Latin handwriting.

A/. //•

(etvflci) (eicri)

(duo) (eiv)

2^ Qb (xaf)

^ "^ Cou)

•^ 0' (hi)

Numerals. — In Greek MSS. numerals are expressed by letters of the alphabet followed by an accent. Three

Bishop of the Goths, borrowed, in the fourth century, the characters of which he made use to translate the Bible into the Gothic language (Socrates, "Hist. Eccles", IV, xxxiii, 6), but he was also indebted to the Latin alphabet; moreover, traces are found in this ancient Gothic writing of the runes in use before that time. So, about 400, St. Mesrop, also desiring to translate the Bible, created the national alphabet of the Armenians by a mixture of the Greek uncial and cursive. The Georgian character, a still nearer neigh- bour to the Greek, has the same origin. Finally, the missionaries sent by the Greek Church among the Slavic people, especially Sts. Cyril and Methodius, created the Slavonic alphabet, from which the writings of all the Slavonic peoples are derived. This was about 855. The Glagolitio alphabet (glagol, "word"), which Slavic legend attributes to the invention of St. Jerome, is probably due to some disciple of St. Cyril, who composed it with the aid of Slavic rimes and the Cyrillic alphabet (Leger's hypothesis 2 ^ V — "Cyrille et Methode", Paris, 1868), 7^ yTdOy) unless it is simply an adapted Greek minuscule (Gardthausen, "Palaeog.", 109). The most ancient MS. in Cyrillic characters is the Gospel of Ostrojnir, dated 1057, but there was discovered at Prespa (Bulgaria), in 1888, an inscription in this writing in the name of the Tsar Samuel, dated 99.3 (Bulletin of the Russian Archa;ological Institute of Constantinople, III, 1899).

A'

(fv) Con) (o-iv)