Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #BreakfastPaleography
Most recents (2)
Well, you asked for it, so here it is: a brief history of the mighty ampersand! #BreakfastPaleography 
The character we know as the ampersand [&] is used in nearly every Latinate language as a stand-in for the word [and]. But it didn’t start life as an abbreviation. It is actually a ligature, a Latin combination of two letters: [e] and [t], or [et], which in English means [and].
Now that you know that much, you can sort of tell that early ampersands are a capital [E] connected to a [t], right? But then the basic form gets stretched and twisted and transformed until it doesn’t really look like e+t anymore.
OK, folks, brace yourselves because here comes the ultimate #BreakfastPaleography thread, in which I will follow the development of the wonderful, magical, mysterious and apparently very flexible letter [g] over the course of more than 2,000 years!
We’ll start in Rome, then jump up to the British Isles before heading back to the Continent. Buckle up, ‘cause here we go!
First up, majuscule [G]. This is the boring part of the story. Ancient Latin epigraphic and numismatic inscriptions form capital [G] in just about the same way we still do. Here’s one from 1st-c. Pompei. There, that was easy! db.edcs.eu/epigr/bilder.p…
