1.
Oliver Cromwell
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Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader and later Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Cromwell was born into the gentry, albeit to a family descended from the sister of King Henry VIIIs minister Thomas Cromwell. Little is known of the first 40 years of his life as only four of his letters survive alongside a summary of a speech he delivered in 1628. He became an Independent Puritan after undergoing a conversion in the 1630s. He was a religious man, a self-styled Puritan Moses. He was elected Member of Parliament for Huntingdon in 1628 and for Cambridge in the Short and he entered the English Civil War on the side of the Roundheads or Parliamentarians. Cromwell was one of the signatories of King Charles Is death warrant in 1649 and he was selected to take command of the English campaign in Ireland in 1649–1650. Cromwells forces defeated the Confederate and Royalist coalition in Ireland and occupied the country, during this period, a series of Penal Laws were passed against Roman Catholics, and a substantial amount of their land was confiscated. Cromwell also led a campaign against the Scottish army between 1650 and 1651, as a ruler, he executed an aggressive and effective foreign policy. He died from natural causes in 1658 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the Royalists returned to power in 1660, and they had his corpse dug up, hung in chains, and beheaded. In a 2002 BBC poll in Britain, Cromwell, sponsored by military historian Richard Holmes was selected as one of the ten greatest Britons of all time. However, his measures against Catholics in Scotland and Ireland have been characterised as genocidal or near-genocidal, Cromwell was born in Huntingdon on 25 April 1599 to Robert Cromwell and Elizabeth Steward. Katherine married Morgan ap William, son of William ap Yevan of Wales, Henry suggested to Sir Richard Williams, who was the first to use a surname in his family, that he use Cromwell, in honour of his uncle Thomas Cromwell. They had ten children, but Oliver, the child, was the only boy to survive infancy. Jasper was the uncle of Henry VII and great uncle of Henry VIII, Cromwells paternal grandfather Sir Henry Williams was one of the two wealthiest landowners in Huntingdonshire. Cromwells father Robert was of modest means but still a part of the gentry class, as a younger son with many siblings, Robert inherited only a house at Huntingdon and a small amount of land. This land would have generated an income of up to £300 a year, near the bottom of the range of gentry incomes, Cromwell himself in 1654 said, I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in considerable height, nor yet in obscurity. He was baptised on 29 April 1599 at St Johns Church and he went on to study at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, then a recently founded college with a strong Puritan ethos
2.
Ampersand
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The ampersand is the logogram &, representing the conjunction word and. It originated as a ligature of the et, Latin for. The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase and per se &, meaning and intrinsically the word, traditionally, when reciting the alphabet in English-speaking schools, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself was repeated with the Latin expression per se. This habit was useful in spelling where a word or syllable was repeated after spelling, e. g. d, o, g—dog would be clear but simply saying a—a would be confusing without the clarifying per se added. It was also common practice to add the & sign at the end of the alphabet as if it were the 27th letter, pronounced as the Latin et or later in English as and. As a result, the recitation of the alphabet would end in X, Y, Z and this last phrase was routinely slurred to ampersand and the term had entered common English usage by 1837. Through popular etymology, it has been claimed that André-Marie Ampère used the symbol in his widely read publications. The ampersand can be traced back to the 1st century A. D. during the following development of the Latin script that led up to the Carolingian minuscule the use of ligatures in general diminished. The et-ligature, however, continued to be used and gradually became more stylized, the modern italic type ampersand is a kind of et ligature that goes back to the cursive scripts developed during the Renaissance. After the advent of printing in Europe in 1455, printers made extensive use of both the italic and Roman ampersands, since the ampersands roots go back to Roman times, many languages that use a variation of the Latin alphabet make use of it. The ampersand often appeared as a letter at the end of the Latin alphabet, similarly, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, as used by children. An example may be seen in M. B, moores 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks. The popular Apple Pie ABC finishes with the lines X, Y, Z, the ampersand should not be confused with the Tironian et, which is a symbol similar to the numeral 7. Both symbols have their roots in the antiquity, and both signs were used up through the Middle Ages as a representation for the Latin word et. However, while the ampersand was in origin a common ligature in the everyday script, the Tironian et is found in old Irish language script, a Latin-based script generally only used for decorative purposes today, where it signifies agus in Irish. This symbol may have entered the language by way of monastic influence in the time of the early Christian church in Ireland. In everyday handwriting, the ampersand is sometimes simplified in design as a large lowercase epsilon or a backwards numeral 3 superimposed by a vertical line. The ampersand is also shown as a backwards 3 with a vertical line above and below it or a dot above
3.
Typographic ligature
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In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. An example is the character æ as used in English, in which the letters a and e are joined, the common ampersand developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters e and t were combined. The origin of typographical ligatures comes from the invention of writing with a stylus on fibrous material or clay, the earliest known script, Sumerian cuneiform, includes many cases of character combinations that, over time, gradually evolve from ligatures into separately recognizable characters. Ligatures figure prominently in many manuscripts, notably the Brahmic abugidas. Medieval scribes who wrote in Latin increased their speed by combining characters. Others conjoined letters for aesthetic purposes, for example, in blackletter, letters with right-facing bowls and those with left-facing bowls were written with the facing edges of the bowls superimposed. In many script forms, characters such as h, m, scribes also used notational abbreviations to avoid having to write a whole character in one stroke. Manuscripts in the century employed hundreds of such abbreviations. In hand writing, a ligature is made by joining two or more characters in atypical fashion by merging their parts or by writing one above or inside the other. While in printing, a ligature is a group of characters that is typeset as a unit, for example, in some cases the fi ligature prints the letters f and i with a greater separation than when they are typeset as separate letters. When printing with movable type was invented around 1450, typefaces included many ligatures and additional letters, Ligatures began to fall out of use due to their complexity in the 20th century. Sans serif typefaces, increasingly used for text, generally avoid ligatures, though notable exceptions include Gill Sans. Inexpensive phototypesetting machines in the 1970s also generally avoid them, the trend was further strengthened by the desktop publishing revolution starting around 1977 with the production of the Apple II. Early computer software in particular had no way to allow for ligature substitution, as most of the early PC development was designed for the English language dependence on ligatures did not carry over to digital. Ligature use fell as the number of traditional hand compositors and hot metal typesetting machine operators dropped since the mass of the IBM Selectric brand of electric typewriter in 1961. A designer active in the period commented, some of the world’s greatest typefaces were quickly becoming some of the world’s worst fonts, Ligatures have grown in popularity over the last 20 years due to an increasing interest in creating typesetting systems that evoke arcane designs and classical scripts. One of the first computer typesetting programs to take advantage of computer-driven typesetting was Donald Knuths TeX program, now the standard method of mathematical typesetting, its default fonts are explicitly based on nineteenth-century styles. Many new fonts feature extensive ligature sets, these include FF Scala, Seria and others by Martin Majoor, mrs Eaves by Zuzana Licko contains a particularly large set to allow designers to create dramatic display text with a feel of antiquity
4.
Mongkut
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During his reign, the pressure of Western expansionism was felt for the first time in Siam. Mongkut embraced Western innovations and initiated the modernization of his country, Mongkut was also known for his appointing his brother, Prince Chutamani, as Second King, crowned in 1851 as King Pinklao. Mongkut himself assured the country that Pinklao should be respected with equal honor to himself, Mongkuts reign was also the time when the power of the House of Bunnag reached its zenith and became the most powerful noble family of Siam. Mongkut was the son of Prince Isarasundhorn, son of Phutthayotfa Chulalok. Mongkut was born in the Old Palace in 1804, where the first son had died shortly after birth in 1801 and he was followed by Prince Chutamani in 1808. In 1809, Prince Isarasundhorn was crowned as Buddha Loetla Nabhalai The royal family moved to the Grand Palace. Thenceforth until their own accessions as kings, the brothers were called Chao Fa Yai, in 1824, Mongkut became a Buddhist monk, following a Siamese tradition that men aged 20 should become monks for a time. The same year, his father died, by tradition, Mongkut should have been crowned the next king, but the nobility instead chose the influential Prince Jessadabodindra, son of a royal concubine rather than a queen. Perceiving the throne was irredeemable and to political intrigues, Mongkut retained his monastic status. Vajirayan became one of the members of the family who devoted their life to religion. He travelled around the country as a monk and saw the relaxation of the rules of Pali Canon among the Siamese monks he met, in 1829, at Phetchaburi, he met a monk named Buddhawangso, who strictly followed the canon. Vajirayan admired Buddhawangso for his obedience to the canon, and was inspired to pursue religious reforms, in 1833, he began a reform movement reinforcing the canon law that evolved into the Dhammayuttika Nikaya, or Thammayut sect. In 1836, Vajirayan arrived at Wat Bowonniwet in what is now Bangkoks central district, but was then the city proper, during this time, he discovered Western knowledge, studying Latin, English, and astronomy with missionaries and sailors. Vicar Pallegoix of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Bangkok lived nearby, Vajirayan admired Christian morals and achievements as presented by the vicar, but could make nothing of Christian doctrine. It was then he made the comment later attributed to him as king, What you teach people to do is admirable, but what you teach them to believe is foolish. King Mongkut would later be noted for his excellent command of English, although it is said that his brother, Vice-King Pinklao. Chulalongkorn also persuaded his fathers 47th child, Vajirañana, to enter the order, accounts vary about Nangklaos intentions regarding the succession. It is recorded that Nangklao verbally dismissed the royal princes from succession for various reasons, Prince Mongkut was dismissed for encouraging monks to dress in the Mon style
5.
Esperanto
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Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language. It is the most widely spoken constructed language in the world, the Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, Unua Libro, on 26 July 1887. The name of Esperanto derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which Zamenhof published Unua Libro, Zamenhof had three goals, as he wrote in Unua Libro, To render the study of the language so easy as to make its acquisition mere play to the learner. Up to two million worldwide, to varying degrees, speak Esperanto, including about 1,000 to 2,000 native speakers who learned Esperanto from birth. The World Esperanto Association has more than 5,500 members in 120 countries and its usage is highest in Europe, East Asia, and South America. The most popular online learning platform for Esperanto, reported 150,000 registered users in 2013, with about 238,000 articles, Esperanto Wikipedia is the 32nd-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, and is the largest Wikipedia in a constructed language. On 22 February 2012, Google Translate added Esperanto as its 64th language, on 28 May 2015, the language learning platform Duolingo launched an Esperanto course for English speakers. As of 5 April 2017, over 800,000 users had signed up, the first World Congress of Esperanto was organized in France in 1905. Since then, congresses have been held in various countries every year, although no country has adopted Esperanto officially, “Esperantujo” is the collective name given to places where it is spoken. Esperanto was recommended by the French Academy of Sciences in 1921 and recognized by UNESCO in 1954, Esperanto was the 32nd language accepted as adhering to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages in 2007. Esperanto is currently the language of instruction of the International Academy of Sciences in San Marino, Esperanto is seen by many of its speakers as an alternative or addition to the growing use of English throughout the world, offering a language that is easier to learn than English. Esperanto was created in the late 1870s and early 1880s by L. L. Zamenhof, and all nations would be united in a common brotherhood. In Białystok the inhabitants were divided into four elements, Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews, each of these spoke their own language. I was brought up as an idealist, I was taught that all people were brothers, while outside in the street at every step I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews and so on. This was always a great torment to my infant mind, although people may smile at such an anguish for the world in a child. Since at that time I thought that grown-ups were omnipotent, so I often said to myself that when I grew up I would certainly destroy this evil. About his goals Zamenhof wrote that he wants mankind to learn and use, en masse, the proposed language as a living one. The number of speakers grew rapidly over the few decades, at first primarily in the Russian Empire and Central Europe, then in other parts of Europe, the Americas, China
6.
Fraktur
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Fraktur is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. From this, Fraktur is sometimes contrasted with the Latin alphabet in northern European texts, similarly, the term Fraktur or Gothic is sometimes applied to all of the blackletter typefaces. Besides the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, Fraktur includes the ß, vowels with umlauts, and the ſ. Some Fraktur typefaces also include a variant form of the letter r known as the r rotunda, most older Fraktur typefaces make no distinction between the majuscules I and J, even though the minuscules i and j are differentiated. One difference between the Fraktur and other blackletter scripts is that in the lower case o, the part of the bow is broken. In Danish texts composed in Fraktur, the letter ø was already preferred to the German, Fraktur types for printing were established by the Augsburg publisher Johann Schönsperger at the issuance of a series of Maximilians works such as his Prayer Book or the illustrated Theuerdank poem. In the 18th century, the German Theuerdank Fraktur was further developed by the Leipzig typographer Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf to create the typeset Breitkopf Fraktur, while over the succeeding centuries, most Central Europeans switched to Antiqua, German-speakers remained a notable holdout. Some books at that time used related blackletter fonts such as Schwabacher, however, the predominant typeface was the Normalfraktur and this move was hotly debated in Germany, where it was known as the Antiqua–Fraktur dispute. The shift affected mostly scientific writing in Germany, whereas most belletristic literature, the press was scolded for its frequent use of Roman characters under Jewish influence and German émigrés were urged to use only German script. This radically changed on January 3,1941, when Martin Bormann issued a circular to all public offices which declared Fraktur to be Judenlettern, German historian Albert Kapr has speculated that the régime had realized that Fraktur would inhibit communication in the territories occupied during World War II. Even with the abolition of Fraktur, some publications include elements of it in headlines, very occasionally, academic works still used Fraktur in the text itself. Notably, Joachim Jeremiass work Die Briefe an Timotheus und Titus was published in 1963 using Fraktur, more often, some ligatures ch, ck from Fraktur were used in antiqua-typed editions. That continued mostly up to the offset type period, Fraktur saw a brief resurgence after the War, but quickly disappeared in a Germany keen on modernising its appearance. In this modern decorative use, the rules about the use of long s and short s. Individual Fraktur letters are used in mathematics, which often denotes associated or parallel concepts by the same letter in different fonts. For example, a Lie group is denoted by G. A ring ideal might be denoted by a while an element is a ∈ a, the Fraktur c is also used to denote the cardinality of the continuum, that is, the cardinality of the real line. In model theory, A is used to denote an arbitrary model, in Unicode, Fraktur is treated as a font of the Latin alphabet, and is not encoded separately
7.
Afrikaans
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Afrikaans is a West Germanic language spoken in South Africa, Namibia and, to a lesser extent, Botswana and Zimbabwe. Hence, it is a language of Dutch, and was previously referred to as Cape Dutch or kitchen Dutch. Although, it is described as a creole, a partially creolised language the least. The term is derived from Dutch Afrikaans-Hollands meaning African Dutch. It is the first language of most of the Afrikaner and Coloured people of Southern Africa, therefore, differences with Dutch often lie in the more analytic morphology and grammar of Afrikaans, and a spelling that expresses Afrikaans pronunciation rather than standard Dutch. There is a degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages—especially in written form. With about 7 million native speakers in South Africa, or 13. 5% of the population and it has the widest geographical and racial distribution of all the eleven official languages of South Africa, and is widely spoken and understood as a second or third language. About 1. 5% of black South Africans speak it as their first language, large numbers of speakers of Bantu languages and English-speaking South Africans also speak it as their second language. It is taught in schools, with about 10.3 million second-language students and it, along with German, was among the official languages of Namibia until the country became independent in 1990, 25% of the population of Windhoek spoke Afrikaans at home. Both Afrikaans and German survive as recognised regional languages in the country, estimates of the total number of Afrikaans speakers range between 15 and 23 million. The Afrikaans language arose in the Dutch Cape Colony, through a gradual divergence from European Dutch dialects, there is a degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, particularly in written form. Nevertheless, Dutch speakers are confronted with fewer non-cognates when listening to Afrikaans than the way round. Mutual intelligibility thus tends to be asymmetrical, as it is easier for Dutch speakers to understand Afrikaans than for Afrikaans speakers to understand Dutch, in general, mutual intelligibility between Dutch and Afrikaans is better than between Dutch and Frisian or between Danish and Swedish. The workers and slaves who contributed to the development of Afrikaans were Asians and Malagasys, as well as the Khoi, San, and Bantu peoples who also lived in the area. African creole people in the early 18th century — documented on the cases of Hendrik Bibault, Only much later in the second half of the 19th century did the Boers adopt this attribution, too. The Khoi and mixed-race groups became collectively referred to as Coloureds, beginning in about 1815, Afrikaans started to replace Malay as the language of instruction in Muslim schools in South Africa, written with the Arabic alphabet, see Arabic Afrikaans. Later, Afrikaans, now written with the Latin alphabet, started to appear in newspapers and political, in 1925, Afrikaans was recognised by the South African government as a real language, rather than simply a slang version of Dutch proper. Before the Boer Wars, and indeed for some time afterwards, rather, Afrikaans was described derogatorily as ‘a kitchen language’ or as ‘a bastard jargon, suitable for communication mainly between the Boers and their servants
8.
Yul Brynner
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Yul Brynner was a Russian-born Swiss film and stage actor. Brynner was best known for his portrayal of King Mongkut of Siam in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I and he played the role 4,625 times on stage. He also starred as Ramesses II in the 1956 Cecil B, deMille blockbuster The Ten Commandments, and played General Bounine in the 1956 film Anastasia, and the gunman Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven. Brynner was noted for his voice and for his shaved head. Earlier, he was a model and television director, and later a photographer, Yul Brynner was born Yuliy Borisovich Briner July 11,1920 in Vladivostok, Far Eastern Republic. He enjoyed telling tall tales and exaggerating his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born Taidje Khan of part-Mongol parentage, in reality of Swiss-German and Russian ancestry, he was born at home in a four-story residence at 15 Aleutskaya Street, Vladivostok. He had a sister, Vera. He occasionally referred to himself as Julius Briner, Jules Bryner or Youl Bryner, the 1989 biography by his son, Rock Brynner, clarified some of these issues. Brynners paternal grandmother, Natalya Yosifovna Kurkutova, was a native of Irkutsk, Brynners mother, Marousia Dimitrievna, came from the Russian intelligentsia and studied to be an actress and singer. Brynner felt a personal connection to the Romani people, in 1977, Brynner was named honorary president of the International Romani Union. Boris Briners work required extensive travel, and in 1923, he fell in love with an actress, Katya Kornukova, at the Moscow Art Theatre, and soon after abandoned his family. Yuls mother took his sister, Vera, and him to Harbin, China. In 1932, fearing a war between China and Japan, she took them to Paris, Brynner played his guitar in Russian nightclubs in Paris, sometimes accompanying his sister, playing Russian and Roma songs. He trained as an acrobat and worked in a French circus troupe for five years. In 1938, his mother was diagnosed with leukemia, and they moved back to Harbin. In 1940, speaking little English, he and his mother immigrated to the United States aboard the President Cleveland, arriving in New York City on October 25,1940, where his sister already lived. Vera, a singer, starred in The Consul on Broadway in 1950 and appeared at The Metropolitan Opera as Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus and she later taught voice in New York. During World War II, Brynner worked as a French-speaking radio announcer and commentator for the US Office of War Information, at the same time, he studied acting in Connecticut with the Russian teacher Michael Chekhov
9.
R rotunda
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The r rotunda, rounded r, is a historical calligraphic variant of the minuscule letter Latin r used in full script-like typefaces, especially blackletters. In this way, it is comparable to other special types used for ligatures or conjoined letters in early modern typesetting. This symbol came in different shapes, all of which were of x-height. The shape of the used in blackletter scripts Textualis as well as Rotunda is reminiscent of half an r, namely. Like minuscules in general, the origins of the letter are in writing as it was common during the medieval period. There are variant forms for the r rotunda glyph, also found in Textura manuscripts is a very narrow second variant, in the form of one solid diamond atop another atop a vertical stroke. Another form found in German typefaces was a variant of that previous and this one can be found used also as the second r of a pair and following e. A fifth form, used in the century in some French italic typefaces, was a derivative either of the Schrift form of the minuscule r. Its form was of a backwards J set just after the same shape rotated 180 degrees and they were separated by a space smaller than the stroke width between them, and the whole character was slanted as though it were cursive. As this typeface had the d that curved to the left, it was used after that character as well. By this time, though, the character was the width as a regular r, so it was maintained because it appeared to its users to have some elegance. The abbreviation etc. was typeset using the Tironian et, as ⁊c. in early prints, later, when typesets would no longer contain a glyph for Tironian et, it became common practice to use the r rotunda glyph instead, setting ꝛc. for etc. Use of the form was never widespread except in blackletter scripts. Modern cursive scripts use a letter r that has a resemblance to the r rotunda, the letter was proposed to be added to Unicode in 2005, in the Latin Extended-D block. As per Unicode 5.1 the encodings are U+A75A Ꝛ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R ROTUNDA, before, the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative had allocated it in the Private Use Area of medievalist fonts at U+F20E and U+F22D. Since the characters are available in Unicode, MUFI recommends that the Unicode code points be used, not the PUA code points. Some fonts treat the glyph as a stylistic variant of r and may make it available by smart font features, e. g. Open Type hist, hlig. Latin Extended-D also has characters for medieval scribal abbreviations, among them is the abbreviation for the syllable rum, consisting of a r rotunda with a cut, resulting in a shape very similar to the astrological symbol for Jupiter
10.
Tironian notes
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Tironian notes is a system of shorthand invented by Tiro, Marcus Tullius Ciceros slave and personal secretary, and later his freedman. Tiros system consisted of about 4,000 abstract symbols that were extended in classical times to 5,000 signs, during the medieval period, Tiros notation system was taught in European monasteries and was extended to about 13,000 signs. Tironian notes declined after 1100 but were still in use in the 17th century. Tironian notes can be themselves composites of simpler Tironian notes, the resulting compound still being far shorter than the word it replaces and this accounts in part for the large number of attested Tironian notes, and for the wide variation in estimates of the total number of Tironian notes. Further, the sign can have other variant forms, leading to the same issue. Nicknamed the father of stenography by historians, Tiro was a slave, the only systematized form of abbreviation in Latin at the time was used for legal notations, but it was deliberately abstruse and only accessible to people with specialized knowledge. Otherwise shorthand was improvised for note-taking or writing personal communications and these notations would not have been understood outside of closed circles, Tironian notes, also known as Tironian shorthand, consisted of abbreviations with Latin letters, abstract symbols contrived by Tiro, and symbols borrowed from Greek shorthand. Tiros notes represented prepositions, truncated words, contractions, syllables, according to Di Renzo, Tiro then combined these mixed signs like notes in a score to record not just phrases, but, as Cicero marvels in a letter to Atticus, whole sentences. Dio Cassius attributes the invention of shorthand to Maecenas, and states that he employed his freedman Aquila in teaching the system to numerous others. Isidore of Seville, however, details another version of the history of the system, ascribing the invention of the art to Quintus Ennius. Isidore states that Tiro brought the practice to Rome, but only used Tironian notes for prepositions, there are no surviving copies of Tiros original manual and code, so modern knowledge is on biographical records and copies of Tironian tables from the medieval period. There is evidence that Tiro taught his system to Cicero and his other scribes, on many of the oldest Tironian tables, lines from this speech were frequently used as examples, leading scholars to theorize it was originally transcribed using Tironian shorthand. Scholars also believe that in preparation for speeches, Tiro drafted outlines in shorthand that Cicero used as notes while speaking. In the 15th century Johannes Trithemius, abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Sponheim, discovered the notae Benenses, a psalm, Tironian notes are still used today, particularly, the Tironian et, used in Ireland and Scotland to mean and, and in the z of viz. In blackletter texts it was used in the abbreviation ⟨⁊c. ⟩ = etc. still throughout the 19th century, the Tironian et can look very similar to an r rotunda, ⟨ꝛ⟩, depending on the typeface. In Old English manuscripts, the Tironian et served as both a phonetic and morphological place holder, for instance a Tironian et between two words would be phonetically pronounced ond and would mean and. However, if the Tironian et followed the letter s, then it would be phonetically pronounced sond and this additional function of a phonetic as well as a conjunction placeholder has escaped formal Modern English, for example, one may not spell the word sand as s&. This practice was distinct from the use of &c. for etc. where the & is interpreted as the Latin word et
