From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Dec 28 2003 - 20:43:40 EST
John Delacour" <JD@BD8.COM>
> He writes 'vous estes' and not 'vous e/tes';
> 'ie les embrasse' and not 'ie les embras/e';
> 'as/urer vostre maie/te' and not 'vo/tre maieste' but elsewhere
> 'ce que vostre maieste'
>
> etc. Smetimes he writes st as it were a ligature
> and sometimes not and sometimes he writes /t.
> That's not consistent to me.
OK I should have looked at it more precisely.
By the way, Montaigne is just at the beginning of the period where
inconsistance of uses started to appear. What seems consistant in Old French
is that the ligature "st" was preferably printed "/t", even is usage in
handwritten script still starts displaying variation.
Also there's no "//" pair, which is written "s/" by interpreting the first
's' as final for the first syllable, and the second '/' as starting the
following syllable. see for example "confe/ser" (This is in opposition to
the English practice that prefers "//", even if there's a syllable break,
but I'm not sure if there are no exception here, depending on cultural
backgrounds, notably in military correspondance, and judiciary acts).
For "vostre" the s is considered final because there's a "-tre" suffix after
"vos". But Montaigne hesitates here, as if he has first written "vos" and
then added the ligaturing stroke to write the end of the word (see the
difference of boldness.
But I admit that the cases "embrasse" is embarassing here (should be
"embras/e" as seen in printed books of that period, or as in "as/urer"), as
well as "maiesté" (should be "maie/té" here).
I note that you do not seem to make distinctions between "i" and "j",
despite I can see these distinctions in the Montaigne letter -- or may be
because I want to see them between a iota-like or not italicized "i" and a
longer and more oblique "j"
As well, the text already contains accents (notably accute accents on final
"é"); You did not use them in your response above despite they are extremely
clearly present and look like a vertical combining apostrophe (the true
apostrophe in that text looks like a grave accent on the following letter
and is not spacing).
But there is still no occurence of the grave accent which occured by
elliding the final consonnant of a non final syllable (see "zelle", written
today "zèle"), or to make explicit distinctions between some words with
distinct grammatical type like "a" (verb) and "à" (preposition).
The stem length of the long s is most often long below the baseline, but
when this is not the case, I think that the orientation and boldness
indicates that the plum was getting out of ink, and the hand anticipated a
movement above the paper to refill the plum. See "re/ponce" (today
"réponse") with a shorter stem on the baseline and "pro/perité" with a long
line.
I note also a strange ligature for the "et" word after "zelle". Am I
misreading it? Is it another ligature that was not noted before and that may
occur ?
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