Palaeographer

Application

Palaeography is an essential skill for many historians, semioticians, and philologists, as it addresses a suite of interrelated lines of inquiry. First, since the style of an alphabet, grapheme, or sign system set within a register in each given dialect and language has evolved constantly, it is necessary to know how to decipher its individual substantive, occurrence make-up and constituency. For example, assessing its characters and typology as they existed in various places, times and locations. In addition, for hand-written texts, scribes often use many abbreviations and annotations so as to functionally aid speed, efficiency, and ease of writing and in some registers to importantly save invaluable space of the medium. Hence, the specialist-palaeographer, philologist and semiotician must know how to, in the broadest sense, interpret, comprehend and understand them. Knowledge of individual letterforms, typographic ligatures, signs, typology, fonts, graphemes, hieroglyphics, and signification forms in general, subsuming punctuation, syntagm and proxemics, abbreviations and annotations; enables the palaeographer to read, comprehend and then to understand the text and/or the relationship and hierarchy between texts in suite. The palaeographer, philologist and semiotician must first determine language, then dialect and then the register, function and purpose of the text. That is, one must by necessity become expert in the formation, historicity and evolution of these languages and signification communities, and material communication events. Secondly, the historical usages of various styles of handwriting, common writing customs, and scribal or notarial abbreviations, annotations conventions, annexures, addenda and specifics of printed typology, syntagm and proxemics must be assessed as a collective undertaking. Philological knowledge of the register, language, vocabulary, and grammar generally used at a given time, place and circumstance may assist palaeographers to identify a hierarchy of texts in a suite through discourse analysis, determining the provenance of texts, identifying forgeries, interpolations and recensions with precision; eliciting a professional authenticity in documentation, textual and manuscript evaluation with view to producing a if required and a critical assessment of a given discourse event as rendered and set in a materiality or medium.