Wednesday, April 03, 2024

Resources for Reading Greek Minuscule

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Over at the Text & Canon Institute website, Clark Bates has put together a helpful list of resources for dealing with Greek abbreviations, contractions, and ligatures. It should be especially useful to students just getting started reading manuscripts. Along with Amy Anderson's article on the benefits of reading Greek manuscripts, it would be great for introducing students to manuscripts.

Ligatures galore in GA 1969, f. 125r!

4 comments

  1. Darrell Post4/04/2024 10:48 pm

    Thanks for sharing this. Excellent resource. A newcomer to collating or transcribing begins with painfully slow progress until at least the common ligatures are learned. My favorite is the Nike "swoosh" logo for alpha-sigma, proving that Byzantines were strong athletes.

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  2. Could you suggest a few manuscripts that would be good to start with?

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    Replies
    1. Darrell Post4/09/2024 4:02 pm

      Minuscules from the 10th and 11th centuries tend to have fewer ligatures. Maybe take a look at GA-560: https://manuscripts.csntm.org/Manuscript/Group/GA_560
      The ligatures are few and fairly easy to decipher. As a bonus, someone wrote in all the chapter and verse numbers in the margin.

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