The caroline minuscule system contained lowercase letters that

carolingian minuscule

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Carolingian minuscule — or Caroline minuscule noun A style of handwriting developed in France at the time of Charlemagne • • • Main Entry: ↑Carolingian … Useful english dictionary

Carolingian minuscule — [ right|frame|Example from 10th century manuscript, Vulgate Luke 1:5 8.] Carolingian or Caroline minuscule is a script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Roman alphabet could be easily recognized by the small literate class… … Wikipedia

Carolingian minuscule — ▪ writing in calligraphy, clear and manageable script that was established by the educational reforms of Charlemagne in the latter part of the 8th and early 9th centuries. As rediscovered and refined in the Italian Renaissance by the humanists,… … Universalium

Carolingian (disambiguation) — Carolingian can refer:* In medieval history, to the Carolingian Empire, founded by Charlemagne. * In medieval history, to the Carolingian dynasty, to which Charlemagne belonged. * In palaeography, to the Carolingian minuscule, a kind of medieval… … Wikipedia

Minuscule — may refer to: Lower case letter Minuscule script, a group of writing styles in ancient and medieval Greek or Latin manuscripts: Minuscule cursive or new Roman cursive, used in Latin manuscripts (3rd–7th century AD) Carolingian minuscule, used in… … Wikipedia

Carolingian Renaissance — An intellectual and cultural revival of the eighth and ninth centuries, the Carolingian Renaissance was a movement initiated by the Carolingian kings, especially Charlemagne, who sought not only to improve learning in the kingdom but to… … Encyclopedia of Barbarian Europe

Carolingian Renaissance — The Carolingian Renaissance was a period of intellectual and cultural revival occurring in the late eighth and ninth centuries, with the peak of the activities occurring during the reigns of the Carolingian rulers Charlemagne and Louis the Pious … Wikipedia

Carolingian dynasty — A Carolingian family tree, from the Chronicon Universale of Ekkehard of Aura, 12th century Carolingian dynasty Pippinids Pippin the Elder … Wikipedia

Carolingian Gospel Book (British Library, MS Add. 11848) — British Library, Additional Manuscript 11848 is an illuminated Carolingian Latin Gospel Book produced at Tours. It contains the Vulgate translation of the four Gospels written on vellum in Carolingian minuscule with Square and Rustic Capitals and … Wikipedia

Carolingian minuscule

Creation

The script ultimately developed from Roman Half Uncial and its cursive version, which had given rise to various Continental minuscule scripts, combined with features from the «Insular» scripts that were being used in Irish and English monasteries. Carolingian minuscule was created partly under the patronage of the Emperor Charlemagne (hence Carolingian). Charlemagne had a keen interest in learning, according to his biographer Einhard :

Temptabat et scribere tabulasque et codicellos ad hoc in lecto sub cervicalibus circumferre solebat, ut, cum vacuum tempus esset, manum litteris effigiendis adsuesceret, sed parum successit labor praeposterus ac sero inchoatus.

«He also tried to write, and used to keep tablets and blanks in bed under his pillow, that at leisure hours he might accustom his hand to form the letters; however, as he did not begin his efforts in due season, but late in life, they met with ill success.»

Characteristics

The value of a standardized hand is vivid to anyone who has tried to read a paragraph printed in Germanic blackletter typeface. Legibility may appear to be of secondary value, even a drawback, in some cultural contexts. Traditional charters, for example, continued to be written in a Merovingian «chancery hand» long after manuscripts of Scripture and classical literature were being produced in the minuscule hand. Documents written in a local language, in Gothic, or Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin, tended to be expressed in traditional local handwritings.

pread

In northern Italy, the monastery at Bobbio used Carolingian minuscule beginning in the 9 th century. Outside the sphere of influence of Charlemagne and his successors, however, the new legible hand was resisted by the Roman Curia ; nevertheless the Romanesca type was developed in Rome after the 10 th century. The script was not taken up in England and Ireland until ecclesiastic reforms in the middle of the tenth century; in Spain a traditionalist Visigothic hand survived; and in southern Italy a ‘Beneventan minuscule’ survived in the lands of the Lombard Duchy of Benevento through the thirteenth century, although Romanesca eventually also appeared in southern Italy.

Role in cultural transmission

Scholars during the Carolingian Renaissance sought out and copied in the new legible standardized hand many Roman texts that had been wholly forgotten. Most of our knowledge of classical literature now derives from copies made in the scriptoria of Charlemagne. There are over 7000 manuscripts written in Carolingian script surviving from the 8 th and 9 th centuries alone.

ee also

* Ada Gospels
* Blackletter
* Latin alphabet

Uppercase and Lowercase: An Etymological Tale of Two Scripts

A printers workshop, 1568. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons [Public domain])

The Emergence of Minuscule Letters

Paleography is the study of historical handwriting, and paleographers have traced how the modern type cases (sometimes misnomered as fonts) came into being. If you have seen an Ancient Roman inscription, you probably noticed that the Latin alphabet was carved in capital letters of equal size. This writing is known as Roman majuscule—majuscule meaning an all-capital script.

As the Romance languages developed out of Latin, the written alphabet also evolved. After the fall of Rome, many Latin texts in the early Middle Ages used a style known as uncial script—more rounded capitals as seen in Gothic fonts. A new type of script known as half-uncial also developed around the same time. Also rounded, this script changed the form of some letters to resemble the lowercase letters of today: the letters b and d acquired their long stems in this form. Both scripts were used throughout the medieval period.

The famous Irish “Book of Kells” was written in uncial script circa 800 CE. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons [Public domain])

Page of a medieval Gospel written in Carolingian minuscule. (Photo: Cropped from Wikimedia Commons [Public domain])

Type and the Printing Press

A Dutch printing press in the 17th century. Note the type cases behind the man on the right. (Photo: Stock Photos from EVERETT COLLECTION/Shutterstock)

In 1439, Johannes Gutenberg introduced the letterpress printing process to Europe, and his invention quickly spread. The early printing press used movable metal type which could be painstakingly arranged to print a text. Each letter was an individual piece, and printers would keep many sizes and fonts on hand. Writing each word backwards, typesetters bound a page’s worth of words together in a frame. Ink was then applied to the frame, and the printing press then pressed it into paper. While still a laborious process by our standards today, the ability to quickly produce multiples of a work was revolutionary.

Metal movable type sorted in a case. Type is being assembled in a frame for printing. (Photo: Cropped from Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 3.0])

A typesetter’s sorting cases, 1740. (Photo: Cropped from Wikimedia Commons [Public domain])

An example of printed typeface using mixed majuscule and minuscule scripts printed in London, 1656. (Photo: Madeleine Muzdakis / My Modern Met)

Uppercase, lowercase, numerals and symbols

Elaboración: Natalia Fernández, Paula Ibarra, Marcela Romero, Sol Vázquez

Artículo en proceso de traducción

When the rhythm of writing accelerated, letters overlapped, irregularities, ascenders and descenders appeared, and so did lower case. Now, those two systems, capitals and lower case, are used in combination, each one with different attributions. There are also other signs which we usually use to compose a text: punctuation, commercial, basic mathematical operators, monetary symbols, usual fractions, to name some.

The process of lower case invention began with the creation of semi-uncial writing which implied a gestural simplification in the drawing of capitals, influenced by the use of the pen and the writing speed. This process consolidated with Caroline minuscule writing.

Today they coexist and two different alphabetic systems with different structures complement each other: capitals and lower case.

Capitals were used for Greek and Roman tombstone inscriptions and maybe that is why they are used to show the importance of certain names or things. They are used at the beginning of sentences or proper names (except in the German language where nouns are capitalized also). They usually connote importance and respect.

Lower case is used for the majority of the actual text. Maybe due to its more functional than aesthetic origin, the connotation of this system is not as «serious» as that of the capitals.

Once the capitals and lower case systems consolidated, the modifications they underwent were practical and trendy ones, but the structure within each sign group was maintained. Though structural differences between both systems are wide and notorious, some relations may be established.

Baseline: it is the horizontal imaginary line on which almost all capitals rest.

Capitals height: it is the height of the capitals or upper case letters, it is measured from the baseline to the upper part of the capitals character.

X height: it is the height of the lower case or minuscule letters, not including ascenders or descenders. The letter «x»is taken as reference because its legs clearly define the baseline and its two upper strokes clearly define its height.

Ascender height: it is the imaginary line reached by the upper extremes of the ascender of a lower case.

Descender height: it is the imaginary line reached by the lower extremes of the descender of a lower case.

Ascender and descender: It is the part of the lower case that goes above the x height or below the baseline.

The proportional relations between these heights are specific to each typographic design. In some cases, the height of capitals coincides with the ascenders, or in others, the latter is slightly higher. These proportions, among other characteristics, are the ones that define the identity in each typeface family.

Capitals, lower case, and legibility

“Legibility is the degree to which glyphs (individual characters) in text are understandable or recognizable based on appearance. “The legibility of a typeface is related to the characteristics inherent in its design … which relate to the ability to distinguish one letter from the other.” Legibility includes factors such as “x-height, character shapes, stroke contrast, the size of its counters, serifs or lack thereof, and weight.” (Strizver, Ilene (2010). Type Rules: The Designer’s Guide to Professional Typography (3rd ed.). New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.)

If we form a word only in capitals, the printed area it produces is regular, with a constant height. If we form words in both capitals and lower case the printed areas are irregular as each letter can occupy different areas of the printed area. These printed areas are specific for each word, thus making word identification quicker and easier to read. The printed are of the word (bouma), is recognized by the reader, decoded, not read word by word.

La mancha de la palabra (bouma), es reconocida por el lector, descifrada, no leída letra a letra.

Numbers

Though there is certain freedom in the design of letters, numbers do not give the designer the chance to exercise creativity in the use of form and proportion. Letters are read forming words, which can compensate a certain degree of ambiguity in their design, but numbers have to be deciphered on their own, with no help from the context.

Lowcase numbers (old style): Claude Garamond was one of the first typographers to study the design of numeric characters together with alphabetic characters. These numbers were devised to work as part of the text, thus its behavior is similar to that of the lower case.

In order for the zero not to be confused with the lower case «o», it usually has a different stroke modulation or the x-height is a bit higher and the ascenders or descenders are a bit shorter that lower case.

Capitals numbers: By the end of the XVIIIth century, due to the many scientific advances, a new kind of numerals known as upper case numbers or capital numbers appeared and they began to be used to document mathematic or technical texts.

These numbers have the same height as capital letters, though slightly lower in some cases. Also, as they all occupy the same width so that they may be vertically aligned when set in columns, they are also named tabular or monospaced numbers.

In this case, in order to avoid confusion between both, the zero number is usually thinner than the capital «O» letter, and this is the width used to determine the other numbers in the typeface family.

Numbers and spacing: the numbers may behave, from the point of view of spacing, like letters and create a uniform color. It tartar nontabular numbers and each will have its own width. Conversely, if the numbers are tabular, all have the same width and will be arranged in successive lines.

Los números minúsculos no producen rupturas en el ritmo del texto.

Numbers and heights: capitals numbers have a height similar to the uppercase letters, sometimes a little less. Similarly, the old style numbers share the stage with lowercase letters, also with slight variations. Zero, one and two similar height to that of “x”, the three, four, five, seven and nine, down, six and eight, ascend.

A la izquierda: números mayúsculos tabulares. A la derecha: números minúsculos de anchos variables.

Orthographic signs

Punctuation in written texts has the purpose of reproducing the intonation of spoken language. Much of the correct expression and understanding of written texts depends on it. These signs created to be read but not heard, are the tuning fork that determines the rhythm within the silent voice of typography. Punctuation marks tempo, tone, volume and unit separation, it organizes speech and its different elements and it helps avoid ambiguity in texts which, without it, might have different interpretations.

Among orthographic signs we have:
Punctuation marks: period, colon, comma, semicolon, and ellipsis marks.

Usually in the composition of the latter the repetition of a period is incorrectly used. This sign has a specially designed character, which contains a spacing that agrees with the idea of creating suspense, doubt, pause in discourse, giving it less spacing between periods.

Intonation marks:: Question and exclamation marks.

Auxiliary signs: parenthesis, square brackets, braces, hyphen, em dash, double quotes, lambda and antilamba, slash, backslash, divider line, asterisk, among others.

These signs are composed in the following way:

Some signs, such as comma or the minus sign can play the role of a double sign without changing shape.

The design of punctuation marks

Punctuation marks are part of the design of a typeface family. As the other ones that conform it, they have constant and variable characteristics. Variable characteristics are the ones that constitute the peculiarities of a family. For instance: in the Roman families, the period is usually round, while in the sans serif ones it may be square, round, rectangular or rhomboidal, depending on the design and proportions of the family to which they belong. In alphabets with calligraphic influence, periods tend to be rhomboidal.

The weight a period should have is an important decision for two reasons: first, because it defines the weight of many of the other punctuation marks, and second, because it has to be heavy enough to be quickly perceived, but not too heavy so as to interfere in the appreciation of the other signs. Lesser weight punctuations such as the period or the comma are more closely associated to the weight of the family, while large structure punctuations, such as question or exclamation marks, have clear characteristics of the family style.

Invariable characteristics are those that have to do with the very structure of the sign, which have a historic origin. If we analyze punctuation marks in several different families, we will find that there are characteristics that do not change from one family to another, such as proportions, the basic structure that makes each sign recognizable as such, the relation these signs have with each other and the way they stand.

Sign alignment

Fractions

Fractions are signs specially designed and spaced for the proper functioning. In most cases, mistakenly, two numbers with the same the body size as the rest of the text being composed are used, aligning them one next to the other separated by a dash which does not have the correct tilting. A fraction is an integrated sign, which has a special disposition in the signs that compose it.

The sign must be visualized as a unit and not as two numbers and a dash, thus the body of the numbers and the spacing of the dash are adjusted for better visualization.

Some typeface families have variables or expert sets with available fractions. There is a dash which is slightly more tilted than the traditional slash, to build fractions. Typefaces include them in the percent sign (%), per thousand (‰) and in the more usual fractions, yet very few have them in separate. In such a case, a cursive dash (⁄) can be used, which has a tilting which is correct to act as substitute.

Bibliography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Carolingian minuscule or Caroline minuscule is a script which developed as a calligraphic standard in the medieval European period so that the Latin alphabet of Jerome’s Vulgate Bible could be easily recognized by the literate class from one region to another. It is thought to have originated before AD 778 at the scriptorium of the Benedictine monks of Corbie Abbey, about 150 km (93 mi) north of Paris, and then developed by Alcuin of York for wide use in the Carolingian Renaissance. [1] [2] [3] Alcuin himself still wrote in a script which was a precursor the Carolingian minuscule, which slowly developed over three centuries. [4] [5] He was most likely responsible for copying and preserving the manuscripts [6] and upkeep of the script. [7] It was used in the Holy Roman Empire between approximately 800 and 1200. Codices, pagan and Christian texts, and educational material were written in Carolingian minuscule.

After blackletter developed out of it, the Carolingian minuscule became obsolete, until the 14th century Italian Renaissance, when the humanist minuscule script was also developed from it. By this latter line the Carolingian minuscule is a direct ancestor of most modern-day scripts and typefaces.

Creation

The script is derived from Roman half uncial and the insular scripts that were being used in Irish and English monasteries. The strong influence of Irish literati on the script can be seen in the distinctively cló-Gaelach (Irish style) forms of the letters, especially a, e, d, g, s, and t.

Carolingian minuscule was created partly under the patronage of the Emperor Charlemagne (hence Carolingian). Charlemagne had a keen interest in learning, according to his biographer Einhard (here with apices):

Temptábat et scríbere, tabulásque et códicellós ad hoc in lectó sub cervícálibus circumferre solébat, ut, cum vacuum tempus esset, manum litterís effigiendís adsuésceret, sed parum successit labor praeposterus ac séró incohátus.

He also tried to write, and used to keep tablets and blanks in bed under his pillow, that at leisure hours he might accustom his hand to form the letters; however, as he did not begin his efforts in due season, but late in life, they met with ill success.

This new script was significantly more legible than the scripts used by Romans or that of the script earlier in the Middle Ages, and offered new features such as word spacing, more punctuation, an introduction of lower-case letters, and conventions such as usage of upper-case for titles, a mix of upper and lower case for subtitles, and lower case for the body of a text. [3] Although Charlemagne was never fully literate, he understood the value of literacy and a uniform script in running his empire. Charlemagne sent for the English scholar Alcuin of York to run his palace school and scriptorium at his capital, Aachen. Efforts to supplant Gallo-Roman and Germanic scripts had been under way before Alcuin arrived at Aachen, where he was master from 782 to 796, with a two-year break. The new minuscule was disseminated first from Aachen, of which the Ada Gospels provided classic models, and later from the influential scriptorium at Marmoutier Abbey (Tours), where Alcuin withdrew from court service as an abbot in 796 and restructured the scriptorium. [8]

Characteristics

Carolingian minuscule was uniform with rounded shapes in clearly distinguishable glyphs, disciplined and above all, legible. Clear capital letters and spaces between words became standard in Carolingian minuscule, which was one result of a campaign to achieve a culturally unifying standardization across the Carolingian Empire. [9]

Traditional charters, however, continued to be written in a Merovingian «chancery hand» long after manuscripts of Scripture and classical literature were being produced in the minuscule hand. Documents written in a local language, like Gothic or Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin, tended to be expressed in traditional local script.

Carolingian script generally has fewer ligatures than other contemporary scripts, although the et (&), æ, rt, st, and ct ligatures are common. The letter d often appears in an uncial form with an ascender slanting to the left, but the letter g is essentially the same as the modern minuscule letter, rather than the previously common uncial ᵹ. Ascenders are usually «clubbed» – they become thicker near the top. [9]

The early period of the script, during Charlemagne’s reign in the late 8th century and early 9th, still has widely varying letter forms in different regions. The uncial form of the letter a, similar to a double c (cc), is still used in manuscripts from this period. There is also use of punctuation such as the question mark, as in Beneventan script of the same period. The script flourished during the 9th century, when regional hands developed into an international standard, with less variation of letter forms. Modern glyphs, such as s and v, began to appear (as opposed to the «long s» ſ and u), and ascenders, after thickening at the top, were finished with a three-cornered wedge. The script began to evolve slowly after the 9th century. In the 10th and 11th centuries, ligatures were rare and ascenders began to slant to the right and were finished with a fork. The letter w also began to appear. By the 12th century, Carolingian letters had become more angular and were written closer together, less legibly than in previous centuries; at the same time, the modern dotted i appeared. [ citation needed ]

Spread

The new script spread through Western Europe most widely where Carolingian influence was strongest. In luxuriously produced lectionaries that now began to be produced for princely patronage of abbots and bishops, legibility was essential. It reached far afield: the 10th century Freising manuscripts, which contain the oldest Slovene language, the first Roman-script record of any Slavic language, are written in Carolingian minuscule. In Switzerland, Carolingian was used in the Rhaetian and Alemannic minuscule types. Manuscripts written in Rhaetian minuscule tend to have slender letters, resembling Insular script, with the letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨t⟩, and ligatures such as ⟨ri⟩, showing similar to Visigothic and Beneventan. Alemannic minuscule, used for a short time in the early 9th century, is usually larger, broader, and very vertical in comparison to the slanting Rhaetian type. It was developed by the monk Wolfcoz I at the Abbey of Saint Gall. [10] In the Holy Roman Empire, Carolingian script flourished in Salzburg, Austria, as well as in Fulda, Mainz, and Würzburg, all of which were major centers of the script. German minuscule tends to be oval-shaped, very slender, and slanted to the right. It has uncial features as well, such as the ascender of the letter ⟨d⟩ slanting to the left, and vertical initial strokes of ⟨m⟩ and ⟨n⟩.

In northern Italy, the monastery at Bobbio used Carolingian minuscule beginning in the 9th century. Outside the sphere of influence of Charlemagne and his successors, however, the new legible hand was resisted by the Roman Curia; nevertheless the Romanesca type was developed in Rome after the 10th century. The script was not taken up in England and Ireland until ecclesiastic reforms in the middle of the 10th century; in Spain a traditionalist Visigothic hand survived; and in southern Italy a ‘Beneventan minuscule’ survived in the lands of the Lombard duchy of Benevento through the 13th century, although Romanesca eventually also appeared in southern Italy.

Role in cultural transmission

Scholars during the Carolingian Renaissance sought out and copied in the new legible standardized hand many Roman texts that had been wholly forgotten. Most of contemporary knowledge of classical literature derives from copies made in the scriptoria of Charlemagne. Over 7000 manuscripts written in Carolingian script survive from the 8th and 9th centuries alone.

Though the Carolingian minuscule was superseded by Gothic blackletter hands, in retrospect, it seemed so thoroughly ‘classic’ to the humanists of the early Renaissance that they took these old Carolingian manuscripts to be ancient Roman originals, and used them as bases for their Renaissance hand, the «humanist minuscule». [11] From there the script passed to the 15th- and 16th-century printers of books, such as Aldus Manutius of Venice. In this way it forms the basis of our modern lowercase typefaces. Indeed, ‘Carolingian minuscule’ is a style of typeface, which approximates this historical hand, eliminating the nuances of size of capitals, long descenders, and so on.