12-10-2020, 03:06 PM
JKP, your adventures in paleography recently sent me down a rabbit hole learning about the evolution of the Roman alphabet. If I were to collect and classify handwritten alphabets / pen tests the way you have, I'd put all alphabets with the same sequence of glyphs after t in the same category together. I can't imagine a better indicator for the time and place where a writer learned his ABCs. Taw was the last letter of the Phoenician abjad. Therefore, in a writing system derived from Phoenician, any letters after the direct descendent of Taw were later additions; their presence and order was a lot less "sacred" than the core 22.
It blew my mind to visit the Netherlands, and learn that in Dutch, y is traditionally regarded as a variation of ij. Sometimes it's written ÿ in order to draw attention to this equivalence. As a result, the estuary in the center of Amsterdam, the IJ, is in the running for the world's shortest place name, since it can be written as Ÿ. (It pretty much never is, though.) I noticed that the ÿ in the alphabet JKP posted is dotted, which I would think could be a big clue in placing it historically. To anyone's knowledge, does the equivalence y = ÿ = ij = ii = ī = 2 (in Roman numerals) extend beyond the Netherlands in the late Middle Ages?
It blew my mind to visit the Netherlands, and learn that in Dutch, y is traditionally regarded as a variation of ij. Sometimes it's written ÿ in order to draw attention to this equivalence. As a result, the estuary in the center of Amsterdam, the IJ, is in the running for the world's shortest place name, since it can be written as Ÿ. (It pretty much never is, though.) I noticed that the ÿ in the alphabet JKP posted is dotted, which I would think could be a big clue in placing it historically. To anyone's knowledge, does the equivalence y = ÿ = ij = ii = ī = 2 (in Roman numerals) extend beyond the Netherlands in the late Middle Ages?