I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on t he PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Latin, Palaeography, and Latin Palaeography Part One For a while, I've been toying with the idea of doing a class called something like 'Palaeography for the SCA,' and analyzing SCA scrolls as if they were historical documents and pointing out the features that paleographers use to localize and date manuscripts. It never happened. It occurred to me that a shorter online format might be good for something similar, and since it's always good to keep one's hand in with Latin, I decided to mix them all together into this: a combination Latin primer and paleography article, which I hope will be part of a series. A few basic notes about Latin Latin is an inflected language, meaning that word endings carry a lot more information than they do in English. In English, the position of a word in a sentence, along with liberal use of prepositions, help to identify what the word is doing grammatically. In Latin, the inflection does that job, making word position much less important, and preposition use less necessary. For example: The boy gives the rose to the girl. The girl gives the rose to the boy. The rose give the boy to the girl. Those are all correct English sentences, but they all mean different things. And the last one means something strange indeed. In Latin, boy is 'puer,' girl is 'puella,' and rose is 'rosa.' Those are all in the nominative case, meaning that in those forms, they are the subject of the sentence. They could also be in the objective case, meaning they are the object of the sentence, and which would be 'puerum,' 'puellam,' and 'rosam.' Or they could be in the dative case, which can mean a couple of things, but often the indirect object. Again, for those nouns, it would be 'pueris,' 'puellae,' and 'rosae.' The verb 'to give' in Latin, for the third person singular is 'dat.' So the first English sentence above could be any of the following in Latin: Puer rosam puellae dat. Rosam puellae puer dat. Puellae puer dat rosam. And so on. There are better and worse organizations, of course, but the general principle is sound. So, let's look at a manuscript. This manuscript is 'dated,' which means just what it sounds like, there's a date on it. Dated manuscripts are very useful to palaeographers, because they can be used to build up characteristics associated with a specific time and place. This helps to make some some manuscripts 'datable,' placed within a specific time range. We'll loop back around to this in a later post. I don't know where this manuscript is archived, sadly, although it associated with Markenfield Hall in Yorkshire near Ripon. This manuscript may be seen in one of their blog posts. ( Click on the image for a larger version in a new window.) One of the things that is nice about a lot of documents, is that there are formulae which can help one to get one's eye in on a specific hand. This document is no exception. The first line is rather elaborate and decorated, so it may not be as much help later on as we might hope, but we shall press on. The first three words are 'Elizabeth Dei gracia.' The script is quite formal, more of a book script than a documentary one. The script changes on subsequent lines as is quite often the case. Different scripts as well as different sizes were used to mark sections in manuscripts. I would call this script something in a Gothic with a high level of execution. (It may be worth noting at this point, that there are multiple ways of characterizing a specific hand and script, and I will be fairly casual about it in these posts.) Looking at the specific letter forms, the z in Elizabeth strikes me as particularly note-worthy. It is even more compressed than I would expect in a Gothic script. The D in 'Dei' harkens back to the uncial, and the ascender is not very distinct. Compare also the t in 'Elizabeth' with the c in 'gracia.' The stroke of the 't' extends markedly above x height, and the c does not. This is worth pointing out because the Latin is wrong - it should be a t - 'Dei gratia.' Gratia is the ablative case of gratia, which means grace. First declension nouns, such as gratia, have the same ending the nominative and ablative case. This can be confusing. Context is important. In the sentence we are looking at, Elizabeth is the subject, not grace. It's also a well-known formula, which helps. At this time, scribes were writing not only in Latin but also in the vernacular, English in this case, and I suspect the scribe simply made the substitution thinking of the English word grace. The ablative case has many uses, one of which is sometimes called 'the ablative of means' and often is translated as 'by.' Dei is the genitive case of deus, god. Or as I'm sure our scribe would think of it, God. Deus is a second declension noun, and the -i ending could also mean plural nominative, but, of course, it doesn't. So 'dei gratia' - by grace of God. The rest of the line is also part of a well-known formula, and reads, 'Anglie (et) Francie et Hib(er)nie.' The '(et)' is to indicate that the word is not spelled out, but that the Tironian note is used to indicate 'et.' The '(er)' is used to indicate that an abbreviation is being used. There is a little swirl above and between the b and the first minim of the n in Hibernie, this is one version of the r-something or something-r abbreviation (er, ir, ri, etc). There were a lot of abbreviations, and they weren't always consistent. 'Anglie,' 'Francie', and 'Hibernie' all end in e. Except they don't, or rather shouldn't. In classical Latin, the second declension genitive ends in -ae. In medieval Latin, that often drifted to an e caudata, ç, and even further to a simple e. Which means that those would read 'Angliae, Franciae, and Hiberniae.' Which is to say, 'of England, France, and Ireland.' The first word of the next line is 'Regina' ... I'll close this post with a few more notes about letter forms which I find interesting. There are two a's in 'gracia,' and they have two different forms. The second, terminal a, is slightly odd, resembling a modern capital A. This form also appears in Elizabeth. The first is something of a hybrid, resembling both the common Gothic a, but with a bit of an Anglicana look, at least to my eye. This form is also used in Francie. In both cases, it is after an r allowing the scribe to push the letters closer together in the approved Gothic style. The other a resembles the one used in the subsequent lines. The scribe has also chosen to 'dot' only a single i - the one in Hibernie. A slightly odd choice, since it is not in a string of minims. I'm linking to a Diaspora posting for comments and such. Comment thread on PlusPora Anyone should be able to read, but a (free) account will be needed to post.

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