Talk:Tironian notes

U+204A

Why is this in “General punctuation”[1]? I've seen it used instead of the letters ‹et› in ‹etc.›, so it is more like an alphabetic presentation form in that (German) text. Is this a punctuation mark in Irish? Wikipeditor 12:04, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

The et in etc. is the Latin word et (et cetera = "and other things"). &c. used to be used the same way in English. Ireneshusband 10:13, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

I was aware of that – just wondered whether current Irish use is responsible for grouping it with punctuation marks. Wikipeditor 04:24, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

The illustration is confusing because, one might think that the second symbol in the figure is the Tironian "z". If it is not can anybody add an illustration of Tironean "z" iether with a modern shape or with old photographed text? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 128.115.27.10 (talk) 22:22, August 20, 2007 (UTC)

I threw in the Old English info because I thought it was interesting. MadMaxBeyondThunderdome 07:11, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Blackletter image

I'm thinking about having the relevant characters on the blackletter image circled, because they're a little hard to see even with the directions in the caption. Is it just me or does anyone else agree? --_{tiny plastic} Grey Knight ⊖ 08:28, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

A lot missing

This article mentions counts as high as 13000 signs within this notation (although with caveats about composites etc) but only really discusses one - the "7"-like "and" symbol - with a passing mention of one more ("shaped somewhat like a "z"").

So what were all the others? Can we have examples of what they looked like, and what kind of thing they were used for? Were there some that were very common and others more obscure - for counts as high as 13000, this must surely be the case, but is there anywhere we can find examples of each? Are there reference lists used by those reading old manuscripts? Or older ones used by those writing them? Is the system even fully understood, or do some remain to be decoded or have to be guessed from context? - IMSoP (talk) 19:50, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

the problem is encoding something written by hand digitally, the marks have to be drawn in illustrator so to have a table with the 4 verb conjugations and 5 noun declinations would take a long time without a digital pen thing and the page would get quite large... but if there are any specific word requests examples just ask. --Squidonius (talk) 23:23, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for the clarification (here and on my talk page). I think the diagram now included goes a long way to addressing my original questions, in that it gives a "flavour" of what these thousands of signs looked like, and represented. I appreciate that digitizing such old hand-written scripts is a laborious process, and certainly wouldn't want someone devoting hours just to satisfy my passing curiosity!

I guess the only thing the article still doesn't really discuss, explicitly, is what level these signs were generally used at: were they mostly syllable/sound marks? Were words abbreviated to their primary letter/sound forms, or were complex marks created which specifically represented a particularly common word, regardless of its length? The example in that diagram implies that something is going on at the word level, but the text doesn't really address this.

Maybe that example could be picked apart a bit, giving some examples of particular signs which (as far as I can see) represent whole words, and how they relate to those in the table? - IMSoP (talk) 19:05, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, good point, that will be expanded. In brief, regarding your question, the ortography/phonetic divide does not exist in classical Latin, it is in fact a problem with romance langauges (for example, shoe is read "sh" (a sound not present in latin) plus the long vowel u:). Tironian notes do not follow fixed and easy rules (say teenagers allways write 8 in place of -ate or -ight) but are more a series of abbreviations used by convention. For adverbs the abbreviations are nearly unpredictable, whereas for adj, nouns and verbs the suffix which dictates the declension case or verb tense/person will be a specific marking on a warped letter, generally representing the first letter or syllable. --Squidonius (talk) 08:27, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Phonetic shorthand

Surely, this part of the article is inaccurate w/r/t text messaging, on-line chatting, and internet posting (4 for 'four,' b& for 'banned,' etc.) -114.91.66.133 (talk) 05:20, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Non-displaying character

In the section Current the following text appears:

The Tironian "et" can look very similar to an "r rotunda" (ꝛ), depending on the typeface.

Unfortunately, the charcter in parentheses fails to display on my system (ꝛ). Is there a universal method we can use to display that charcter? --Jubilee♫clipman 06:43, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

For my part, I would like to know why I see this symbol just find when viewing wikipedia but not while viewing a mediawiki page or my own wiki. What is wikipedia doing different (or better)?

RiverStyx23{_submarine^target} 23:02, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

It might be that other servers/wikis are not configured to serve up UTF-8. E.g. ISO-8859-1 does not include the character. It could also be the case that Wikipedia serves embedded fonts (though I don't know that for sure). Maybe other fonts on other systems don't include that character. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 09:34, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Latin Extended-D, etc.

Some notes may have been added to Unicode by MUFI proposals. Review the Extended-D block chart and the list of Medievalist Additions. Other additions can be found here: Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement; Latin Extended Additional; Ancient Symbols ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 19:05, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. In the references there is a website which is a scan of a MS by karl eberhand henke, which is really good and has a lot that can still be added (it is in German though), apparently Griechische Tachygraphie und Tironisch Noten is good, but is hard to find.

The main article does mention the MUFI initiative, although there are only 3 tironian notes in there I think. Unicode has mostly letter variants (which one day will be a page to join them up) and ligatures, which is quite odd as there are really few paleographic fonts (to the extent that the PC font "old english" is tragically used as a blackletter example in that page). The MUFI website has the proposals themselves and contains more useful information, the nordic text initiative is good too (for scribal abbreviations not TN). But I'll see if there are any in Unicode thanks.--Squidonius (talk) 20:13, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Likeness to "7"

I think it would be pertinent to the article to add that due to the Tironian 'et's likeness to the number "7", said number is used extensively in informal online writing in Irish (and possibly in Scots Gaelic, though I have no experience of that), particularly in the abreviation "7rl", also spelled"srl" which stands for " 's aráile/ is aráile/ agus aráile" meaning "etc...". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.77.111.117 (talk) 16:14, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

I was surprised to discover that the best substitute for the Tironian "et" is on the same key on my computer as the ampersand!

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.122.49.58 (talk • contribs)

Depending on your OS, if you use an Irish keyboard layout, you might be even more surprised to find the actual Tironian et accessible via ⇧ Shift+AltGr+7. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 09:24, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Tiro's dates of birth and death

On Marcus Tullius Tiro it says that he died around 4 BC, also with sources. Does somebody have the overview to judge which sources are better? It would be nice to have consistency. Seattle Jörg (talk) 13:18, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Yes, this page cites his birth as 90bc, but apparently Jerome says he died at the age of 99. 2601:344:4000:3D49:558D:5219:B4DA:2486 (talk) 16:43, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Image

In the image uxote ("wife") should be uxore Furius (talk) 15:16, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Stenographic characteristics of Tironian et

A regular editor here may be better able to answer the question at talk:Ampersand#Stenographic characteristics of Tironian et? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 09:47, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Z in viz.: Tironian et or yogh?

Further to my edit summary comment, there is no question the letter Ȝ/ȝ (yogh) was sometimes rendered z, especially by typographers, in printed material. What is questionable is if the yogh, whether rendered as ȝ or z, once commonly (or ever) stood for et. Even if it did, it is still questionable whether it was a putative yogh-et, as opposed to the ⁊-et, that gave rise to the z in viz. Note that Yogh § Middle English presently contains a picture which per the caption in that section contains both a blackletter ȝ and ⁊ in close proximity, and it is the latter letter (heh) which here denotes et: "spede þe plouȝ: ⁊ sende us korne" (emphasis added). NB also the resemblance of the ornamental blackletter ⁊ to certain forms of the letter z. Finally, the hypotheses of the yogh-origin of the z in the abbreviated viz. and the Tironian et origin of the same cannot, strictly speaking, both be true. What might still be true is that, as is often the case in etymology, one of the two gave rise to the result (here: the viz-z) influenced by the other. This too however would need to be cited. On present evidence, it seems to me that an exclusive ⁊-origin of the viz-z is more likely, however better citations would be helpful in any case. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 23:51, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

I think maybe the answer is definition 1 at Wiktionary ꝫ: 1. Scribal abbreviation of ⟨et⟩ as -et. habꝫ → habet (as opposed to a free-standing et [and]). I have no subject expertise, but seems credible. [See also Wiktionary viz. ]--𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 11:16, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

But is it valid in any case?

But perhaps more to the point, I don't see how this is valid:

and in the z of viz. (for et in videlicet – though here the z is derived from a Latin abbreviation sign, encoded as a casing pair U+A76A Ꝫ and U+A76B ꝫ

It is self evident that the word viz. does not use a yogh, any more than does the modern rendering of the surname Menzies (pronounced Mengis). Yes, historically they were handwritten with a yogh but for centuries a ⟨z⟩ has been used. Thus, IMO, the tironian note symbol is not still being used (whereas, as the image in the article demonstrates, the ⟨⁊⟩ does have continued use in Gaelic). So my inclination would be to solve two problems at once by removing that phrase. At the very least, it is OR. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 11:29, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Interesting finds and findings. 'Couple of points though, for the record (even if you, JMF, may already know at least some of this):

• I'm only noticing now that Ꝫ/ꝫ and Ȝ/ȝ are not the same letters, respectively – at least not in Unicode:

• Ꝫ U+A76A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ET
• ꝫ U+A76B LATIN SMALL LETTER ET
• Ȝ U+021C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER YOGH
• ȝ U+021D LATIN SMALL LETTER YOGH

I would like to know if these homomorphic if not identically-looking letters diverged at some point (from a common ancestor), and if so, how recently they may have been the same letter. Do their apparently distinct uses (which would seem to belie some of my above writings, which assumed there was only Zuul^W, err, yogh) correspond to differences between these letters, i.e. was what Unicode calls the letter et only used in specific applications that don't overlap with those of the letter yogh?

• I note that certain (black)letterforms of the ⁊ may have given it a shape that would have resembled a letter z if not letter et and yogh. While a common ancestor is out of the question despite the "phænotypic" resemblance, the same question as to categorical distinction or usage overlap in practice does apply here too.
• I find your following sentence slightly confusing: "Thus, IMO, the tironian note symbol is not still being used (whereas, as the image in the article demonstrates, the ⟨⁊⟩ does have continued use in Gaelic)." The reason I find that confusing is because the ⁊ is a Tironian note symbol, specifically the Tironian et, or, as Unicode calls it the ⁊ U+204A TIRONIAN SIGN ET (latterly also supplemented by a ⹒ TIRONIAN SIGN CAPITAL ET). This (green) quote reads as if you're making a distinction between "the tironian note symbol" and "the ⟨⁊⟩". (Btw., did you know your ⟨mathematical angle brackets⟩ are distinct from these 〈angle brackets〉? The More You Know☆…) If however you're not making a distinction, then the contradiction between ⁊ "not still being used" and its "continued used in Gaelic" seems jarring.
• At the peril of repeating myself, I wasn't previously aware of the existence of another "et" (besides, arguably, the ampersand) that substantially shares its name with Tiro's et, and its form with the yogh, while being identical with neither. Its existence, along with the Wiktionary information you linked, which suggests its use as an all-but-universal abbreviation sign, or at least one used for all kinds of different letters and syllables, would seem to lend credence to the idea that a letter of that shape, even if not technically a yogh, could indeed be used to abbreviate the suffix -et. I have no opinion on whether the use of the ⁊ for et, for which we do have evidence before us, was, as you suggest, limited to non-suffix use cases, such as ⁊c. (=etc.).
• You are correct that it is self-evident viz. [sic] does not include ⁊, but whether the abbreviation was historically/ever written vi⁊ (besides viꝫ) might still be worth establishing, and a note clarifying the point could still have a place in this article.

Where though does all of the above leave this article, and perhaps others implicated herein? —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 23:06, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Well if it is of any consolation, it comes as a complete surprise to me too. I knew of the ⁊ as a tironian and Gaelic equivalent of &, meaning and (Latin: et).

I knew of the yogh, as an ordinary letter in middle English and Scots, which suffered the same fate as the thorn in being represented with the nearest equivalent letter in Flemish typefaces (z and y, respectively).

Until I read the Wiktionary article, I wasn't aware of a distinct grapheme for the ⟨-et⟩ word-ending in medieval manuscripts, but I can see that medievalists would have argued for it. But why would they want a capital form?

But is any of that relevant? It still seems clear that the only tironian note still in use is ⁊ (in Gaelic). The ⟨z⟩ in viz. is just that, a ⟨z⟩. Just like the ⟨Y⟩ in Ye olde is a ⟨Y⟩ and not a thorn. Do we need to say more? 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 23:40, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

The still-in-use criterion might be relevant to statements in Wikipedia articles attesting to it, but other than that, it's probably not a very useful discriminator. Unicode is ambitious enough not to just include characters still in use but also historical ones, so I would be neither surprised nor opposed if Tironian notation signs—currently semi-supported in a Private Use Area—eventually came to be fully represented in some Unicode block. What's another few thousand characters among a possible 1,112,064? ^{at least – if they were to yet forgo UTF-16 compatibility sometime in the future, Unicode could expand much farther, UTF-8 especially}

Your question as to why they would have wanted a capital form is much more to the point. For some reason there's also the ⹒ captial (TIRONIAN SIGN CAPITAL ET), and I don't think the shorthand system(s) used by Tiro et al. ever had case. I have a sneaking suspicion the capital -et (Ꝫ U+A76A) and Tironian capital et (U+2E52) may both have been introduced by completionists who didn't really know the subject matter all that much better than you and me. OTOH, maybe they did consider what you said and still decided for inclusion, precisely because of possible mixed uses, because if you want to render text that includes some such mixed uses in ALL CAPS – well, there you go; that's probably what that's for.

By the way, just to push back a little, in good humour: I've been known to throw in the odd þe olðe, perhaps for the heavy metal umlaut flair. Mind you, the possibly only reason many of these "odd" and "historic" characters were substituted with boring Latinate English alphabet forms was technical restrictions: It wasn't really feasible for þe olðe (and I realise my "heavy metal" if not "métal hurlant" ð is probably technically incorrect here) –where was I? Oh, right: It wasn't really feasible for þe olðe typographer to carve, cast and husband a smørrebrød^W err, smörgåsbord of exotics, and the inclusion of all and sundry characters was even less feasible come Messrs. Sholes and Glidden, Monsieur Émile Baudot, and Bob Bemer et alia.
HOWEVER:
I suspect all these "exotics" stand to make a bit of a comeback, because of Unicode, smartphones and emojis.
Unicode means All The Þings can now be part of the same character set, and emojis have driven the introduction of these "exotic" characters through the back door. It just so happens that the same input method editor all the girls (and boys) are already using on their me, myself and i-phones to pick the perfect emoji for that tweet—and to text without a physical keyboard—can also seamlessly accommodate other "exotic" characters, and once people are used to input method editors, it's only natural to demand the same on your desktop too. Hence these "exotics" are now available in a way they never were before, or at least not since the advent of printed type. They're available, and they can be typed or at least conveniently selected. It's the same reason en-dashes and em-dashes are making a comeback: Allow the input and people will put it in. ...as the actress said to the bishop. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 05:01, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

I have updated the article per above discussion. But viz. should never have been there in the first place because it was the wrong kind of et. It was a Scribal abbreviation, not a tironian note. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 12:04, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

I have also replaced the nonsense at viz.. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 12:42, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

I still have a follow-up: Was the just-removed "vi⁊." purely a Wikipedia invention, or did this form —however technically incorrect— previously appear elsewhere? If yes, then it might still be worth mentioning, albeit with an appropriate disclaimer. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 08:12, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Well if you can find it, feel free. But the original text clearly misrepresented the source

• Brewer, Ebenezer (1970). Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. New York: Harper & Row. p. 943.

which they cited but says no such thing – or to be fair, they extrapolated incorrectly from what it does say. I suspect that it is highly likely that whoever wrote the original text made the same error of confusing the word-ending -et (as in licet, habet etc) for the single Latin conjunction et. All the signs are that it is a Wikipedia artefact. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 10:13, 20 March 2024 (UTC)