24-08-2026, 05:05 PM
Thank oshfdk you for short comment. I will post more details soon, step by step.
It is important to distinguish this idea from ordinary medieval Latin abbreviation. Traditional abbreviation makes the writing shorter; a lossy system would make the message itself shorter.
Medieval scribes left out letters, syllables, endings, and sometimes whole words, but the Latin sentence was generally still there underneath. A reader who knew the conventions could expand the abbreviations and recover something close to the original wording and grammar.
The system I am proposing would go further. It would leave out grammatical information that an informed reader did not need, preserving only enough of the semantic content to reconstruct the intended meaning. The exact original Latin sentence might no longer be recoverable, but the practical instruction would be.
I am not claiming that the source language was definitely Latin. Latin simply fits this model particularly well because it carries so much grammatical information in its endings. If the reader could recover that information from context, practical knowledge, or the position of words within the encoded sequence, much of it would not need to be written down at all.
In that sense, this would not be heavily abbreviated Latin. It would be something more radical: Latin material reorganized into a different system, one designed to preserve meaning rather than the exact original wording.
It is important to distinguish this idea from ordinary medieval Latin abbreviation. Traditional abbreviation makes the writing shorter; a lossy system would make the message itself shorter.
Medieval scribes left out letters, syllables, endings, and sometimes whole words, but the Latin sentence was generally still there underneath. A reader who knew the conventions could expand the abbreviations and recover something close to the original wording and grammar.
The system I am proposing would go further. It would leave out grammatical information that an informed reader did not need, preserving only enough of the semantic content to reconstruct the intended meaning. The exact original Latin sentence might no longer be recoverable, but the practical instruction would be.
I am not claiming that the source language was definitely Latin. Latin simply fits this model particularly well because it carries so much grammatical information in its endings. If the reader could recover that information from context, practical knowledge, or the position of words within the encoded sequence, much of it would not need to be written down at all.
In that sense, this would not be heavily abbreviated Latin. It would be something more radical: Latin material reorganized into a different system, one designed to preserve meaning rather than the exact original wording.