Hello,
I can't seem to find the topic about fonts with glyphs used in medieval Latin. Could someone link to it, please?
AFAIK this form of Latin is much broader than the Classical one. Are there experts (linguists) for the whole field or is it generally too much for a single person?
Also, are there many similar medieval glyphs for Byzantine Greek? Certainly there would be at least musical notations.
Thank you an advance.
0
Comments
We're talking about a period of some hundreds of years during which time regional script variants were far more prevalent than at later times. This affects both general styles of script used in particular regions, and also the shape of individual letters over time and across locales.
Then there is the role of abbreviation and ligation, including the use of specialised signs to indicate common abbreviations, some of which are encoded in Unicode but far from all of them.
I have more experience working with Byzantine text (Greek and Latin) than with Western mediaeval Latin, and that's a period of 1000 years. The existence of a centralised authority means that there is less of the regional fragmentation that characterises script in the Western Middle Ages, but the long period and geographical extent of the Roman Empire in the east and its colonies (including colonies in what we now think of as the west, notably Italy), means that significant variation is still encountered, especially in non-documentary texts of the kind I worked on with the numismatists and sigillographers at Dumbarton Oaks for the Athena Ruby project. In the later documentary scribal style, developed for fast copying in monastic and imperial scriptoria, ligation is even more prevalent than in Western Latin manuscripts, although abbreviation per se less so: all the letters are written, you just might not recognise them from the ways that they are combined.
I notice that some mufish glyphs and characters in the 'global' table have broken diacritics, for example the hungarumlaut at some places. I believe this is the typical distortion that happens in hungarumlaut interpolation when the first acute in some weight is interpolated to the second acute in another. I hope it gets fixed! The font is really something.
and many more. Am I the only one seeing this? It was similar on my phone.