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Experimental replica of VMS properties with a given corpus - Printable Version

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RE: Experimental replica of VMS properties with a given corpus - -JKP- - 13-04-2019

Here's an example of light-to-moderate abbreviation. I just grabbed one that was handy. It's earlier than 15th century so it doesn't include the common ris/tis/cis/gis/ abbreviations, but it includes most of the ones that were common in the 15th century and one extra (the "u" abbreviation that looks like "cc") which was almost gone by the 15th century.

It looks like a lot of abbreviations, but most of them fall into a few basic groups:

[Image: ModerateAbbreviation.png]

RE: Experimental replica of VMS properties with a given corpus - Aldis Mengelsons - 13-04-2019

[ From which page did you took that text??? translating its kinda interesting

RE: Experimental replica of VMS properties with a given corpus - bi3mw - 13-04-2019

This raises the question, are there fonts that can represent medieval abbreviations? - In Unicode I found only You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

When encrypting a corpus, having abbreviations would also be a problem. This does not just apply to anachronistic methods. Unless excessive abbreviations themselves are intended to be a kind of encryption. But then you would have to go far beyond Marco's 20%.

RE: Experimental replica of VMS properties with a given corpus - -JKP- - 13-04-2019

There probably are, but I haven't investigated it because I create my own fonts.

If you need something specific, I can probably create it as long as it doesn't require 40,000 different abbreviations.  :-)

But it seems that there must be something out there with the most common ones.

RE: Experimental replica of VMS properties with a given corpus - -JKP- - 13-04-2019

(13-04-2019, 12:24 PM)Aldis Mengelsons Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[ From which page did you took that text??? translating its kinda interesting

Were you talking about the medieval sample, Aldis? It's folio 101 (original foliation) BAV Pal. Lat. 25.

RE: Experimental replica of VMS properties with a given corpus - -JKP- - 13-04-2019

Medieval Font Initiative

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"Free and open-source fonts

Two open-source designs based on Bembo are Cardo and ET Book. The Cardo fonts, developed by David J. Perry for use in classical scholarship and also including Greek and Hebrew, are freely available under the SIL Open Font License. Unimpressed by the first Bembo digitisation, statistician and designer Edward Tufte commissioned an alternative digitisation for his books in a limited range of styles and languages, sometimes called 'ET Bembo'. He released it publicly as an open-source font named 'ET Book' in September 2015."

Font Squirrel has the Cardo font:

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It comes in Regular, Bold, Italic and looks pretty good:

   

I haven't looked at Bembo yet.

RE: Experimental replica of VMS properties with a given corpus - bi3mw - 13-04-2019

Thanks JKP, here's my quick, provisional solution. Let's see if there are any abbreviations:

(fonts): Unicode font for medievalists (Latin, IPA and Runic) [universe]
sudo apt-get install fonts-junicode

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (Also available for download as TTF)

[Image: Junicode.png]

RE: Experimental replica of VMS properties with a given corpus - Linda - 13-04-2019

(13-04-2019, 01:30 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This raises the question, are there fonts that can represent medieval abbreviations? - In Unicode I found only You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

When encrypting a corpus, having abbreviations would also be a problem. This does not just apply to anachronistic methods. Unless excessive abbreviations themselves are intended to be a kind of encryption. But then you would have to go far beyond Marco's 20%.

I dont know anything about fonts but i found this

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RE: Experimental replica of VMS properties with a given corpus - -JKP- - 13-04-2019

This is a brief article but it has an interesting little chart of which abbreviations Gutenberg considered important enough to include in his typefaces.

I'm not going to copy over their chart to the forum because someone took some time to make it and it wouldn't be right to snatch it, but here is a link:

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.....
Edit (addition): Here is a link for the Cardo user's manual: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

A lot of work has gone into this. There's even a section on Old Italic where you can see the shape-legacy from Phoenician, Runic, and Greek characters.
  • There's a section on musical symbols which I find interesting because some of them could potentially be combined to create some of the common Latin paragraph markers (not pilcrows, but the ones used for glossing specific passages). It also includes the VMS rare character that looks like capitalA which is found in Old Russian, Coptic Greek, Greek, math, music and a few other places.
  • It includes the pi-rho symbol (the one that is frequent on Greek coins and which looks a bit like EVA-P) in the Beta Code section.
  • The PHI Latin section includes the y symbol (F02D5) and s symbol (both very common abbreviations).
But, I didn't see the wide range of Latin symbols that I expected. I don't know if the charts in the manual are only showing a small subset of characters or if they didn't fully document them.

RE: Experimental replica of VMS properties with a given corpus - -JKP- - 13-04-2019

Okay, let's take a look at this... There are a few things I noticed that scribes usually don't do in 15th century manuscripts...

This may seem a bit nit-picky, but I don't mean it that way. They are just things that jump out at me as being less common...

[Image: Junicode.png]
  • Servorum and ruarum (4th line) would typically be written as servo[rum symbol] and ruo[rum symbol]. Probably some scribes would write it as in the sample, there was lots of variation, but I almost always see it written with the rum symbol like the words at the end of that line.
  • Even though it's "os" rather than "us", many scribes would abbreviate the first word with the y symbol. The same with vicinis on the last line. Even though it's "is" rather than "us", this would frequently be written with y at the end. In fact, the [font=Eva]y[/font] symbol was used very frequently. propitius on the 2nd line would frequently end with y, as well.
  • obprobrium on the last line would probably be abbreviated in a dozen different ways. Some would put y at the end. Some wouldn't even write out the whole word. I've seen this spelled ob[pro symb] and then br with a long line through the ascender of the b.
  • salutaris (first line) would often be written saluta[ris symbol]. Sometimes it is also written salut[smoke macron]is. The first is more common.
  • propter (2nd line) is often written [pro symbol]pt[smoke symbol]
  • I can't get used to long-s at the ends of words—it looks odd. The vast majority of scribes used a B-shaped ess, sigma-shaped ess, or snake-shaped ess at the ends of words.
That's probably more than enough. Even though there was big variation in how scribes applied abbreviations and ligatures, there are certain patterns that happen more frequently than others.