A Lexicon of Abbreviations & Ligatures in Greek Minuscule Hands: ca. 8th century to ca. 1600

The Project involves the compilation of an electronic dictionary of ligatures, abbreviations and symbols encountered in Greek medieval manuscripts (equivalent to Cappelli’s famous Dizionario for Latin), offering students and scholars who lack specialised palaeographical skills access to the content of thousands of manuscripts dated or datable between ca. 8th century to ca. 1600, including early Greek printed books (incunabula). Making use of the latest digital techniques and Artificial Intelligence technology (AI), and building on previously unpublished research of our team we are working to produce a comprehensive database of handwritten letterforms and symbols. Users will provide a digital photograph that an AI process will compare with entries in the database. Matching results will be presented in order of decreasing similarity, taking into consideration idiosyncrasies of actual scribal hands. Each match will be displayed with supporting information, such as provenance, date and scribe. The material will be digitally scanned from facsimiles of manuscripts and stored in the freely accessible database. This will offer an indispensable educational tool and facilitate new research into the evolution of Greek minuscule script and the variations between scribes. The method adopted will be designed to be easily adaptable for use with other, less widely studied, scripts and languages.