Learning to read the manuscripts, one line at a time.
Reading a language is one skill. Reading a ninth-century hand is another — closer to learning someone's handwriting than to learning a language, and nobody is born able to do it.
This is a place to practise. Every line here is cut from a photograph of a real manuscript, and the work is staged: you begin by looking, and only much later by writing anything down.
Openly licensed transcriptions, catalogued by HTR-United, joined to the library facsimiles they were made from. Nothing is redrawn or reconstructed: the lines are cut from the page images along the transcribers' own baselines, and material outside the line you are working on is blurred rather than removed — a manuscript page is crowded, and pretending otherwise teaches the wrong habit.
When a line carries a sign you may not know — an abbreviation, a decorated initial, a word broken across the line-end — it is explained underneath, with a worked example from that same manuscript.
Where an expansion has not been checked against a source, it says so. Nineteen of the twenty-eight signs taught here are verified against Cappelli's Lexicon Abbreviaturarum or Thompson, with the page read as an image. The other nine carry a mark on their face saying they are not — including everything the Syriac track says about the dots, which no Syriacist has yet ruled on.
This matters more than it sounds: a tool that teaches a wrong expansion confidently is worse than one that teaches nothing.
Your reading stays in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere. As you work, the tool records which letters you mistake for which and shows you your own commonest slips — the fastest guide to what to practise next.
Five tracks in four languages, a few hundred lines, and an apparatus still being checked. It is offered now because the fastest way to find out what is wrong with it is to put it in front of people who read these hands for a living.
Corrections and objections are wanted, and so are the awkward questions — which scripts belong here, what a class would actually need, and where the teaching is simply wrong. Every line carries a link that reports its shelfmark, folio and transcription, so an objection arrives checkable.
Write to wilson.pruitt@gmail.com.