From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Jun 07 2003 - 17:01:24 EDT
From: "Lukas Pietsch" <lukas.pietsch@pluto.uni-freiburg.de>
> > >I was hoping to find someone who had additional evidence for this
> character.
>
> I happened to come across it the other day in a modern printed edition
> of 17th- to 19th century handwritten English letters (Miller, Kerby
> A., Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, & David N. Doyle. 2002. _Irish
> immigrants in the land of Canaan: letters and memoirs from colonial
> and revolutionary America, 1675-1815._ Oxford: Oxford UP) I haven't
> got it here just now, but if it is important I might be able to
> provide a few scans.
>
> If I remember correctly, it was being used just as an handwritten
> ligature of the word "per", as in "per day", "per year", etc.
>
Some common handwritten scripts that cannot be easily unified with Latin letters is the stenographic system used up to the 80's in Europe, and which is probably still used within brainstorming meetings to note the discussions.
This script uses many abbreviations, often with ligatures or very simplified "letter" shapes without regard to the orthograph (most often it's a abbreviated phonetic transcription).
This writing system was teached up to the 70's and often was a recognized skill for contracting a job for females in business offices. This writing system was often used with many personnal customizations of symbols, but in most cases, employees using it could interchange their written notes because there used the same tought conventions.
There are interesting signs and symbols in this script, which could still have their use today for other applications than "live transcriptions". I have a couple of books (published in 1972 and 1974) which describes the system (in business environements), and wonder if someone was sponsoring a proposal to encode it...
-- Philippe.
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