Ligatures - Tachygraphy (2)

Tachygraphy Backgrounder:

E.M. Thompson,  
Handbook Of Greek and Latin Palaeography,

(1893) p. 71-74:

TACHYGRAPHY

Greek (p.71-4)

Although the subject of shorthand writing does not concern the study of palaeography very nearly, it calls for a brief notice, inasmuch as there is some connexion between its symbols and certain of those employed in the abbreviations and contractions of ordinary MSS., and as tachygraphic signs themselves are occasionally used by scribes and annotators ; and, furthermore, there are in existence a certain number of MSS., both Greek and Latin, written in shorthand systems.

First, as to shorthand systems among the Greeks, we are at once involved in difficulties. For the question whether they possessed a system of true tachygraphy, that is of a shorthand capable of keeping pace with human speech, still remains to be solved. There were, as we know from existing records, both as early as the fourth century B.C. and in the early centuries of the Christian era, as well as in the middle ages, systems whereby words could be expressed in shortened form by signs or groups of signs occupying less space than the ordinary long-hand. But these systems seem to have been rather in the nature of shortened writing, than of the tachygraphic script which we know as shorthand. It is true that a passage in Diogenes Laertius was formerly interpreted to imply that Xenophon wrote shorthand notes (υποσημειωσαμενος) of the lectures of Socrates ; but a similar expression elsewhere, which will not bear this meaning, has caused the idea to be abandoned. The first undoubted mention of a Greek writer of what may be shorthand occurs in a passage in Galen (περι των ιδιων βιβλιων γραφη), wherein he refers to a copy made by one who could write swiftly in signs, δια σημειων εις ταχος γραφειν; but whether in this instance a shortened form of writing, brachygraphy, or a true tachygraphy is implied, we have no means of ascertaining.

The surviving records of the Greek systems have been divided into three groups. At the head of the first group, which embraces all that has been found dating down to the third century A.D., stands the fragment of an inscription, discovered at Athens in 1884, which is ascribed to the fourth century B.C. The inscription describes a system whereby certain vowels ami consonants can be expressed by strokes placed in various positions. But in this instance, also, it has been maintained that a system of brachygraphy and not one of tachygraphy is referred to. ¹ A few papyri of the second and third centuries also belong to the group ; but the most important member is a waxed book of several leaves, in the British Museum (Add. MS. 33270), of the third century, inscribed with characters which are inferred to be in Greek shorthand, the only words written in ordinary letters being in that language. This important MS. appears to be the exercise book of a shorthand scholar who has covered its pages with symbols, which in places are repeated again and again, as if for practice. Here we may at length have a system of true tachygraphy ; but as yet the symbols remain undeciphered. ²

The second group is confined to a few fragmentary papyri and tablets, from the fourth to the eighth century, chiefly among the Rainer collection in Vienna, to which Professor Wessely has given much attention. ³

The third group stands quite apart from the others, and is representative of the system of the tenth century. First is the Paris MS. of Hermogenes, containing some marginal notes in mixed ordinary and tachygraphical characters, of which Montfaucon ⁴ gives an account with a table of forms. Next, there is a series of MSS. which owe their origin to the monastery of Grotta Ferrata, viz. the Add. MS. 18231 of the British Museum, written in the year 972, and others of the same period (Pal. Soc. ii. 28, 85, 86), which are full of partially tachygraphic texts and scholia and also contain passages in shorthand symbols. And lastly there is the Vatican MS. 1809, a volume of which forty-seven pages are covered with tachygraphic writing of the eleventh century, which have been made the subject of special study by Dr. Gitlbauer for the Vienna Academy. ⁵ Here, again, it appears that the mediaeval system of the third group is not one of true tachygraphy, but a syllabic system, having little advantage over ordinary writing in respect of speed, but capable of ensuring the packing of a lai'ger amount of text into a given space. It is therefore not regarded as a developement of any ancient system, but rather as a petrified fragment, as it has been called, of an earlier and better system.

Other varieties or phases of Greek shorthand, of a later time, have been traced. Some shorthand passages which occur in a fourteenthcentury M.S.. and a passage from a fifteenth-century MS. in the Vatican, have recently been published. ⁶
 

Latin

According to Suetonius, ⁷ the first introduction of shorthand signs, notae, in Rome was due to Ennius ; but more generally the name of Cicero's freedman, Tiro, is associated with the invention, the symbols being commonly named notae Tironianae. Seneca is said to have collected the various notae known at his time, to the number of five thousand. Shorthand appears to have been taught in schools under the Empire ; and the Emperor Titus himself is said to have been expert in writing it. There seems to have been some connexion between Greek and Latin tachygraphy, certain symbols being the same in both.

The Tironian notes belonged to a system which was actually tachygraphic: each word was represented by an independent character, alphabetic in origin, but with an ideographic value. In the mediaeval forms in which they have descended to us, they have probably been amplified from simpler and more comprehensive shapes of ancient date, having received diacritical additions after the practice of the system had died out, and when the study of the notes had become a mere antiquarian pursuit.

There are no documents of very ancient date in Tironian notes. But the tradition of their employment survived in the Merovingian and Carolingian chanceries of the Prankish Empire, where a limited use of them was made in the royal diplomas, indicating briefly, e.g. the composition of the deed, the name of the person moving for it, that of the revising official, etc., perhaps as safeguards against forgery. Under the Carolingian line they were more largely employed, and official MSS. were written in these characters as, e.g.. the formulary of Louis the Pious. They are found worked into the subscriptions and other formal parts of royal deeds down to the end of the ninth century; and so customary had their employment become in those positions, that the scribes continued to imitate them after they had forgotten their meaning.

In literature the Tironian notes were adopted in the ninth and tenth centuries by the revisers and annutators of texts. For example, the scholia and glosses in a MS. of Virgil, at Berne, of the latter half of the ninth century (Pal. Soc. ii. 1:2) are partially written in these signs.

Of the same period also are several 31 SS. of the Psalter written in these characters, which it has been suggested were composed for practice ; and the survival of Tironian lexicons, or collections of the signs, copied at this time, seems to point to an effort to keep them in the recollection of men. A syllabic system, composed of Tironian notes and other independent signs, has been found in use in documents of North Italy of the tenth century ; and has been recognized as the system employed by Gerbert d'Aurillac, Abbot of Bobbio in 982 and afterwards Pope Silvester II. Traces of similar systems in France and Spain have also been discovered. But artificial revivals of systems which have lost their real vitality can only prove spasmodic and abortive. Even the pretentious vanity of the scribes could not protract the use of the notes, and they disappeared entirely in the eleventh century. ⁸

---

1. Gomperz, Ueber ein bisher unbekanntes griech. Schriftsystem aus tier Mitte des vierten vorchristlichen Jahrunderts (Vienna Academy), 1884, anil Neue Bemerkungen 1895. See also P. Mitzschke, Eine griech.Kurzschrift aus dem vierten Jahrhundert, in the Archie fur Stenographie, no. 434.
2. See F. W. G. Foat, On old Greek Tachygraphy (Journ. Hi-Hen. Studies, xxi), giving a full bibliography, 1901.
3. Ein System altgriech. Tachygraphie (Vienna Acad.), 1896.
4. Palaeoyr. Graec. 351.
5. Die drei Systems der griech. Tachygraphie (Vienna Acad.), 1896.
6. T. W. Allen, Fourteenth Century Tachygraphy, the Journal of Hellenic Studies, xi. 286 ; Desrousseaux, Sur quelques Manuscrits d'Italie, Melanges of the Ecole Francaise de Rome. 1886. p. 544.
7. 'Vulgares notas Ennius primus mille et centum invenit.'
8. E. Chatelain, Introduction a la lecture des Notes Tironiennes (with 18 plates , 1900, gives a full bibliography of the subject.

Ligatures and Tachygraphy

There is an intimate relationship between the ligatures (connected writing) introduced in the 8th century A.D. alongside the Minuscule script, and longstanding Tachygraphy practices (shorthand, symbols) among Greeks and Romans.

The first and most obvious case of tachygraphy (shorthand) is the Abbreviations and Symbols used for the Sacred Names (Nomina Sacra), which were introduced way back in the 2nd century at the start of the spread of Christianity.  These are found in just about every early surviving manuscript.   But only a handful of words were so shortened.  Things didn't apparently proceed much further than that for many centuries, even though Roman tachygraphy (shorthand) was known and practiced by military and governments even from the time of Jesus.

But in the 8th century with the development of a formal and organized minuscule script (smaller connected handwriting), the opportunity was taken to make extensive use of many special symbols, which represented common letter combos and were easy to write and rapid to execute on parchment.
Here are a good selection of samples, without which it would be hard to read many later copies of the NT writings:

By Ligatures are meant combinations of letters made for the sake of speed-writing rather than symbols encompassing the meaning of a word or words (i.e., Abbreviations & Symbols.  For those see further below):

Ligatures
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Standard
Ligatures

Later
Ligatures

Special 
Superpositions

Ligatures were made according to set rules, which were almost always followed in early minuscule MS (8th cent.).  As uncial letter forms were mixed in with pure minuscule (for instance beta, kappa, pi), ligatures were created combining both forms.  In some case super-positioning (placing one letter above another) created yet more new forms.  - Source: B.A. van Groningen, Short Manual of Greek Palaeography, (Leiden: 1940)

We have enlarged and enhanced the original scans from the fordham.edu website, for readability.  Just click on them to see the examples better.

The following abbreviations and symbols (representing meanings of words/concepts) and examples of actual tachygraphy will also be extremely useful:

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Tachygraphy Symbols (Shorthand) often repeated words

mr.scrivener

James Snapp - Tachygraphy in Luke

James recently posted on textual criticism (yahoo groups) the following tidbit:

This might be trivial; nevertheless: in Lk. 2:22, did Luke write the equivalent of "their," (AUTWN) "his," (AUTOU) or "her" (AUTHS)? Maybe the answer should be "No."

AUTWN has extremely strong support. D's AUTOU is probably a result of retro-translation. UBS-2 lists MS 76 as support for AUTHS, and this is repeated by the NET's online notes, but WW observes that Gregory and Hatch saw that this was not the case. Hatch went through the trouble of explaining why 76 was erroneously cited as a witness for AUTHS; he assigns the blame mainly to Scholz, in a footnote in an article, "The Text of Luke II, 22" in Harvard Theological Review (#14, from 1921). This issue of HTR is online at Google Books; I've added it to my virtual library-shelf of NTTC resources. It's the same annual in which Kirsopp Lake drew attention to Epistula Apostolorum. Hatch's article begins on p. 377; the digital page number in Adobe Reader is 396.

Decades after Hatch's article, UBS-2 still cited 76 as support for AUTHS, and so do the notes in the NET. (Sound effect: grunt-sigh of exasperation.) UBS-4 has no note here.

Hatch mentions that Origen discussed the problematic AUTWN in his fourteenth homily on Luke. Hatch also states that the Sahidic version supports AUTOU. Hatch proposes that Luke, misunderstanding a non-Greek source-document that was intended to refer to Mary's purification, wrote AUTOU, and that later scribes replaced AUTOU with AUTWN. He also mentions that although Erasmus and Stephanus printed AUTWN, the Complutensian Polyglott, and Beza, and the Elzevir text contained AUTHS, apparently as a Latin-based conjecture. (This is reflected in the KJV and NKJV.)

Metzger noted that "in cursive Greek script the pronoun was abbreviated AUT with the termination expressed by a "shorthand" stroke." Now, it occurs to me that an ambiguously abbreviated "AUT" could account for all the extant readings: scribes could independently unfold an ambiguously abbreviated "AUT" in different ways, as AUTWN or as AUTOU or as AUTHS.

2427 has some abbreviations of AUTOS, about which Colwell wrote something, but since it's a forgery let's take that off the table.

In an issue of The Journal of Hellenic Studies (XI, 1890), T. W. Allen wrote an article called "Fourteenth Century Tachygraphy." (It includes two Plates which are near the end of the volume.) On p. 291, he mentions "AUTOU is the XYZ of the Grotta Ferrata tachygraphs." ("XYZ" being a symbol in the printed text which cannot be duplicated without special fonts.) In a footnote he adds,

"As this mode of contracting AUTOS is rare, I may mention that it occurs (AUTOU and AUTON) frequently in the Paris MS. Coislin 387 (s. xi.)." (I think Paris MS. Coislin contains Porphyry's Isagoge.)

The Grotta Ferrata tachygraphs are, it seems today, not an easy subject to research in English, but in a short book published in 1889 book called Notes on Abbreviations in Greek Manuscripts, Professor Allen discusses them and their abbreviations. I'll skip most of the details; let's get to what he says about AUTOS on p. 9:

"AUTOS. A ligature for this pronoun worth recording occurs in some of the Grotta Ferrata mss. ; it consists of the A and U run together with the case-ending added : cf. AUTOS AUTOIS AUTHN hEAUTWN hWSAUTWS from Gr. Ferr. B. A. i. and Angel. B. 3. II. A similar combination of A and I occurs in AUTOU from Aed. Christ. 70 (a. 1104) and the ligature is probably common."

In the 1901 issue of the Journal of Hellenic Studies (accessible at Archive), F. W. G. Foat has an article, "On Old Greek Tachygraphy," beginning on p. 238. Foat helpfully profiles the MSS of all sorts, from all ages, that contain special tachygraphic symbols, monograms, etc, from the major MSS down to ostraca. Foat included a Plate (#XVIII) of Brit. Mus. Add. MS 33270, a third-century wax tablet (about the size of a Kindle) that seems to contain about 14 pages of tachygraphical writing. On p. 259 of his article, as Foat attempted to use a feature in the wax tablet to decipher part of another text (in Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxi. 14, col. 27) -- the details are rather dizzying so let's skip them for now -- he wrote:

"We have, as certainly belonging to the tachygraphy of this 3rd century, the small crossbar horizontally placed on an upright stem (in the familiar sense I think of AUT-), from forms common to the waxen-book, to this third-century papyrus, and to the scanty contents of the four Leipzig fragments, though not in the Rainer fragments. These [here a footnote shows the tachygraphical characters themselves] give the readings of AUTOUS, AUTON, AUTA or AUTO, and AUTOCHQON or some such word. But all these, like the last, are merely possible, for this may be an advanced stage of the system before us, and in dealing with such tachygraphy, a posteriori inferences, as we have seen, are almost worthless."

Well, you must see where I'm going with these tidbits: maybe Luke used ambiguous tachygraphy in 2:22, perhaps meaning AUTHS but allowing readers to interpret it as AUTWN, AUTOU, or AUTHS. This conjecture accounts for all its rival variants and does not seem to raise any new interpretive issues.

Yours in Christ,

James Snapp, Jr.

Greek Tachygraphy (shorthand)

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  PAPYRUS, GREEK TACHYGRAPHY. Three fragments written on both sides, totalling 35 lines, [probably Egypt, 3rd to 4th century], significant examples of ancient Greek tachygraphy or shorthand, approx. 150 x 65mm, 150 x 35mm, 90 x 60mm, with six further very small fragments, two with writing, fragile, unexamined out of glass frame. Provenance: Ajasse sale, Lyon, 12 May 2005 -- the collection of Albin Schram.

Christie's  Lot 1 /Sale 7590,  Price Realised (pounds) 1,250 ($2,444)

Evidence of shorthand systems for writing Greek has survived from the 4th century BC but Greek tachygraphy is less well documented than the Tyronian system for Latin developed in the 1st century BC on the Greek model. Papyri discovered in Egypt, most famously from Oxyrhynchus and Antinoopolis, have proved an extremely valuable source of information since they include manuals of shorthand as well as tachygraphic texts (see H.J.M. Milne, Greek Shorthand Manuals, 1934). Yet their number is comparatively small and they have often survived in a more fragmentary state than the present items. As more is known about Greek shorthand, debate is growing on its possible role and influence in the transmission of texts, particularly of those now known as the New Testament.

(Anon, - Christie's Selling page)

History

Classical antiquity

The earliest known indication of shorthand systems is from Ancient Greece, namely the Parthenon in which a stone from mid-4th century BC was found. The marble slab shows a writing system primarily based on vowels, using certain modifications to indicate consonants. Hellenistic tachygraphy is reported from the 2nd century BC onwards, though there are indications that it might be older. The oldest datable reference is a contract from Middle Egypt, stating that Oxyrhynchos gives the "semeiographer" Apollonios for two years to be taught shorthand writing. Hellenistic tachygraphy consisted of word stem signs and word ending signs. Over time, many syllabic signs were developed.

- Wikipedia article Tachygraphy