The Typo That Survives Extinction
A scribe's error in a single manuscript can be so influential it gets copied for centuries, becoming the "correct" version. Journey into the world of paleography and discover the linguistic…
Tag: manuscript
Digitizing the Dead Sea Scrolls: An OCR Puzzle
Teaching a computer to read is simple, but what if the text is a 2,000-year-old, fragmented manuscript written in an archaic script? The digitization of the Dead Sea Scrolls presents…
The Secret Code of Scribes
Before the printing press, scribes used a secret code of symbols and shortcuts to write faster and save precious parchment. This lost art of scribal abbreviations, a kind of medieval…
The Character with No Sound
Before it was the linchpin of your email address, the @ symbol was a character without a sound, a silent mark on the page. This is the secret history of…
The Last Words of Old Prussian: How a Language Was Erased by the Sword
The death of a language is usually a slow fade, but Old Prussian was not so lucky. It was systematically eradicated by the sword of the Teutonic Knights in a…
Carved in Stone, Read on the Edge: Unlocking Ogham, Ireland’s Ancient Alphabet of Lines
Forget runes and hieroglyphs; journey to ancient Ireland to uncover Ogham, a script written not on a page but on the very edge of stone. This unique alphabet of lines…
The Whispering Road: How Sogdian Became the Lingua Franca of the Silk Road
Long before English dominated global trade, the language of the Sogdians, an Iranian people from Central Asia, connected the great empires of the East and West. This is the story…
The Character with a Secret History: How a Roman Scribble Became the Ampersand
The ampersand (&) is more than a simple stand-in for "and"; it's a linguistic fossil with a secret history. This ubiquitous symbol began as a quick ligature by Roman scribes…
Old Hungarian Runes: An Insight into Magyar Prehistory
Introduction The Old Hungarian script, often termed as “runic” due to its superficial resemblance to the Germanic runes, offers a fascinating insight into the early...