List of Ecclesiastical Abbreviations

List Of Ecclesiastical Abbreviations

The ecclesiastical words most commonly abbreviated at all times are proper names, titles (official or customary), of persons or corporations, and words of frequent occurrence. A list of those used in Roman Republican and early Imperial times may be seen in James Chidester Egbert, Jr.'s Latin Inscriptions (New York, 1896), 417–459.

The Jewish scribes and Talmudic scholars also had frequent recourse to abbreviations. Between the seventh and ninth centuries the ancient Roman system of abbreviations gave way to a more difficult one that gradually grew up in the monastic houses and in the chanceries of the new Teutonic kingdoms. Merovingian, Lombard, and Anglo-Saxon scripts offer each their own abbreviations, not to speak of the unique scotica manus or libri scottice scripti (Irish hand, or books written in the medieval Irish hand). Eventually such productive centres of technical manuscripts as the Papal Chancery, the theological schools of Paris and Oxford, and the civil-law school of Bologna set the standards of abbreviations for all Europe.

Medieval manuscripts abound in abbreviations, owing in part to the abandonment of the uncial, or quasi-uncial, and the almost universal use of the cursive, hand. The medieval writer inherited a few from Christian antiquity; others he invented or adapted, in order to save time and parchment. They are found especially in manuscripts of scholastic theology and canon law, annals and chronicles, the Roman law, and in administrative documents, civil and privileges, bulls, rescripts. They multiplied with time, and were never so numerous as on the eve of the discovery of printing; many of the early printed books offer this peculiarity, together with other characteristics of the manuscript page.

The development of printing brought about the abandonment of many abbreviations, while it suggested and introduced new ones a process also favoured by the growth of ecclesiastical legislation, the creation of new offices, etc. There was less medieval abbreviation in the text of books much used on public occasions, e.g. missals, antiphonaries, Bibles; in one way or another the needs of students seem to have been the chief cause of the majority of medieval abbreviations. The means of abbreviation were usually full points or dots (mostly in Roman antiquity), the semicolon (eventually conventionalized), lines (horizontal, perpendicular, oblong, wavy curves, and commas). Vowel-sounds were frequently written not after, but over, the consonants. Certain letters, like p and q, that occur with extreme. frequency, e.g. in prepositions and terminations, became the source of many peculiar abbreviations; similarly, frequently recurring words like et (and), est (is). Habit and convenience are today the principal motives for using abbreviations. Most of those in actual use fall under one or other of the following heads:

1. Administrative
2. Liturgical
3. Scholastic
4. Chronological