[DCRM-L] Brevigraphs (aka "special marks of contraction in continuance of the manuscript tradition")

[Erin Blake]

I meant to bring this up last month, when it came up in a discussion on C18-L, but better late than never: it turns out that "brevigraphs" is the accepted term for what DCRM has been calling "special marks of contraction in continuance of the manuscript tradition."

See, for example:
-- the transcription conventions for "brevigraphs" adopted by the Text Creation Partnership working on EEBO transcriptions at http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/docs/dox/allchars.html
-- use of "brevigraph" in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines for transcription (search "brevigraph" in Catalogers' Desktop)
-- Peter Beal's definition of "brevigraph" in _A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology, 1450-2000_. Oxford: OUP, 2008, as "a term sometimes used to denote a type of abbreviation in which two or more letters are represented by a single symbol."

The term was coined in Samuel A. Tannenbaum, _The Handwriting of the Renaissance_. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930:
"Brevigraphs. For economic reasons, in all probability, scriveners had developed the habit of contracting certain frequently recurring syllables, especially such as occur at the beginning and at the end of words. In the middle of a word the phenomenon is not quite so frequent. These contracted syllables occur so often, even in printed books, that a thorough knowledge of them is indispensable. It will be convenient to call these syllables, consisting of a letter whose normal form has been modified so as to make it stand for something else, Brevigraphs (from brevis and grapho). These are not shorthand symbols. . . ."

To help make it clear that it is only brevigraphs, not modern conractions, that get expanded in square brackets, the current draft of DCRM(G) now reads: If brevigraphs (special marks of contraction in continuance of the manuscript tradition) have been used..." and subsequent uses of "contraction" in this sense have been replaced by "brevigraph." (See http://dcrmg.pbworks.com for draft; see 0G8.2 in DCRM(B) and DCRM(S) for the current wording). 

Note that although "brevigraph" is not currently in the OED, Joel S. Berson (who started the thread on C18-L) says he's providing the word and a variety of examples of its use to the editors for future consideration.

  EB.

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Erin C. Blake, Ph.D. | Curator of Art & Special Collections | Folger Shakespeare Library | 201 E. Capitol St. SE | Washington, DC 20003-1004 | office tel. 202.675-0323 | fax 202.675-0328 | e-mail: eblake at folger.edu