Development Before Tironian shorthand became popularized, literature professor Anthony Di Renzo explains, "no true Latin shorthand existed." The only systematized form of abbreviation in Latin was used for legal notations (). This system, however, was deliberately abstruse and accessible only to people with specialized knowledge. Otherwise, shorthand was improvised for note-taking or writing personal communications, and some of these notations would not have been understood outside of closed circles. Some abbreviations of Latin words and phrases were commonly recognized, such as those of
praenomina, and were typically used for
inscriptions on monuments.
Isidore of Seville, however, details another version of the early history of the system, ascribing the invention of the art to
Quintus Ennius, who he says invented 1100 marks (). Isidore states that Tiro brought the practice to Rome, but only used Tironian notes for prepositions. According to
Plutarch in "Life of Cato the Younger", Cicero's secretaries established the first examples of the art of Latin shorthand:
Introduction There are no surviving copies of Tiro's original manual and code, so knowledge of it is based on biographical records and copies of Tironian tables from the
medieval period. Before Tiro's system was institutionalized, he used it himself as he was developing and fine-tuning it, which historians suspect may have been as early as 75 BC, when Cicero held public office in
Sicily and needed his notes and correspondences to be written in code to protect sensitive information he gathered about corruption among other government officials there. In the 15th century
Johannes Trithemius, abbot of the Benedictine abbey of
Sponheim in Germany, discovered the
notae Benenses: a psalm and a Ciceronian lexicon written in Tironian shorthand. In
Old English manuscripts, the Tironian served as both a phonetic and morphological place holder. For instance, a Tironian between two words would be phonetically pronounced
ond and would mean 'and'. However, if the Tironian followed the letter
s, then it would be phonetically pronounced
sond and mean 'water' (ancestral to
Modern English sound in the geographical sense). 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& (although this occurs in an informal style practised on certain Internet forums and sometimes in texting and other forms of instant messaging). This practice was distinct from the occasional use of
&c. for
etc., where the
& is interpreted as the Latin word ('and') and the
c. is an abbreviation for Latin ('[the] rest'). ==Current==