TACHYGRAPHY.
Greek.
The Greeks appear to have had a system of shorthand at a very early date. A fragment of an inscription found recently on the Acropolis at Athens has been shown by Gomperz ← Ueber ein bisher unbekanntes griech. Schrift-system aus der Mitte des vierten vorchristlichen Jahrhunderts, Wien, 1884. See also P. Mitzschke, Eine griech. Kurzschrift aus dem vierten Jahrhundert, in the Archiv für Stenographie, No. 434. to be a portion of an explanation of a kind of shorthand, composed of arbitrary signs, as old as the fourth Century B.C. A passage in Diogenes Laertius was formerly interpreted to imply that Xenophon wrote shorthand notes (ὑποσημειωσάμενος) of the lectures of Socrates ; but a similar expression elsewhere, which will not bear this meaning, has caused this idea to be abandoned. The first undoubted mention of a Greek shorthand writer occurs in a passage in Galen (περὶ τῶν ἰδίων βιβλίων γράφη) , wherein he refers to a copy made by one who could write swiftly in signs, διὰ σημείων eἰς τάχος γράφειν ; but there is no very ancient specimen of Greek tachygraphy in existence. The occurrence, however, in papyri of certain symbols as marks of contraction or to represent entire words, and particularly the comparatively large number of them found in the papyrus of Aristotle's work on the Constitution of Athens, written about A.D. 100, goes to prove that the value of such symbols was commonly understood at that period, and indicates the existence of a perfected system of shorthand writing. A waxen book of several tablets, acquired not long since by the British Museum (Add. MS. 33,270), and assigned to the 3rd Century, is inscribed with characters which are surmised to be in Greek shorthand, the only words written in ordinary letters being in that language. A system of shorthand was practised by the early Christians for taking down sermons and the proceedings of synods.
But we must descend to the tenth century before we meet with Greek tachygraphic MSS. which have been deciphered. The first is the Paris MS. of Hermogenes, which contains some marginal notes in mixed ordinary and tachygraphical characters, of which Montfaucon ← Palæogr. Græc. p. 351. gives an account with a table of forms. Next, there is a series of MSS. which owe their origin to the monastery of Grotta Ferrata, viz. the Add. MS. 18,231 of the British Museum, written in the year 972, and others of the same period (Pal. Soc. ii. pl. 28, 85, 86), which are full of partially tachygraphic texts and scholia, and also contain passages in shorthand pure and simple. And lastly there is the Vatican MS. 1809, a volume of which forty-seven pages are covered with tachygraphic writing of the eleventh Century, which have been made the subject of special study by Dr. Gitlbauer for the Vienna Academy, Some shorthand passages which occur in a fourteenth Century MS., and a passage from a fifteenth Century MS. in the Vatican, have recently been published. ← T. W. Allen, Fourteenth Century Tachygraphy, in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, xi. 286; Desrousseaux, Sur quelques Manuscrits d'Italie, in the Mélanges of the Ecole Française de Rome, 1886, p. 544.
The shorthand system of these later examples is syllabic, the signs, it is thought, being formed from uncials; and it has been concluded that it represents, if not a new creation of the ninth or tenth Century, at least a modification and not a continuation of the older system —in a word, that two systems of Greek shorthand have existed. For it is found that the forms of contraction and abbreviation in Greek MSS. of the middle ages are derived from two sources, most of them springing from an ancient system, but others clearly being contributed by the later system of shorthand.
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