Track 3 of the MVP, and the first vernacular one. Written for someone who has read the Caroline tracks here, or who reads printed Old French and has never read a manuscript. Frequencies are real, counted over 2,070 lines / 54,099 characters of ground truth from the five 13th–14th-century witnesses of the CIHAM-HTR Fabliaux corpus (see corpus/sources.yml). Nothing here is invented for illustration.
Caroline minuscule was made to be legible. Over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was squeezed: parchment was expensive, universities and a growing lay readership wanted more text per leaf, and scribes obliged by narrowing every letter, breaking curves into angles, and abbreviating relentlessly. What came out is the Gothic bookhand — textualis — and by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it hardens further into the dense black textura of the printed Bibles that imitated it.
The hand in this track sits comfortably before that extreme. It is compressed and angular but still separates most letters, which is exactly why it is the right place to meet the change.
If you have done the Latin tracks, unlearn one habit: the gaps. Caroline gives you white space between letters and words, and your eye uses it without being asked. Gothic takes much of it away.
Not the alphabet. Three things, in order of how often they bite:
(a) Minims — far and away the worst. A minim is one short vertical stroke. In this hand i, u, n, m are built from identical minims, and so are parts of r. Five minims in a row can be inui, muu, nui, unn… The scribe will not help you: there is no dot on the i by default. You resolve it by knowing the word, which is why the language matters here more than in the Latin tracks (§6). A worked case: ml̾t (36×) is mult, and the ul is two minims and a stroke that you will misread as ul, nl or ill until you have met the word a few times.
**(b) Fusion, or biting.** When two curved letters meet, their bowls merge and share a single stroke — de, do, po, bo, pp. The pair reads as one shape. Caroline never does this; Gothic does it constantly, and it is the main reason a word looks shorter than it is.
(c) u and v are the same letter, and so are i and j. The scribe writes one form. uꝰ is vous; ura may be vra. Expect to supply the distinction yourself — modern editions add it, the manuscript does not.
A fourth, milder: word division is unreliable. Short words lean on their neighbours, and a preposition may sit tight against its noun. Trust the sense, not the gaps.
The Fabliaux witnesses are verse, and the layout follows: two columns, one octosyllabic line per ruled line, the couplets rhyming in pairs. Three consequences worth having in mind:
above, will often settle a word the ink leaves ambiguous. Using them is technique, not cheating.
read them as separate words.
Ruling is usually visible as faint lines. Rubrics and initials are in red; a · is the ordinary point.
Counted over the 2,070 lines. This is where the reading time goes.
A bar over a vowel stands for a missing n or m. Roughly 1,036 instances (569 written as precomposed vowels, 467 as a combining mark on another letter).
| sign | count | reads as | real example |
|---|---|---|---|
õ | 183 | on / om | mõ = mon, sõ = son, nõ = non |
ẽ | 158 | en / em | biẽ = bien, nẽ = nen |
ĩ | 112 | in | bĩe = bien |
ã | 100 | an / am | tãt = tant, grãt = grant |
ũ | 16 | un / um |
q̃ = que118 times (q̃ 100, capital Q̃ 18) — the single most abbreviated word in the corpus, which figures in a language this full of subordinate clauses. Its neighbour qͥ (42, plus qͥl 18) is qui / qu'il: a superscript i after q gives -ui.
| sign | count | reads as | real example |
|---|---|---|---|
⁊ | 380 | et | the Tironian note; looks like a z with a bar |
ꝑ | 139 | par / per | bare ꝑ (75×) is the preposition par; ꝑdu = perdu, ꝑole = parole |
ꝰ | 78 | -us / -ous | uꝰ (59×) is vous — by itself most of this sign's work |
ꝯ | 64 | con- / com- | ꝯme = come, ꝯte = conte, ꝯter = conter |
ẜ | 8 | ser | |
ł | 8 | l with stroke | |
ꝓ | 1 | pro | rare in the vernacular; common in Latin |
⁊ at 380 is more frequent than every brevigraph after it combined. Learn it first.
The corpus distinguishes two marks that look similar and mean different things:
out, and what it is depends on the word.
The vertical-tilde words are worth memorising as shapes, because they are frequent and opaque:
| form | count | reads as |
|---|---|---|
ml̾t | 36 (+ mlt̾ 6, Ml̾t 4) | mult / molt — "very, much" |
ch̾r, ch̾rs | 34 together | chevalier, chevaliers |
ap̾s | 5 | après |
A small letter written above stands for itself plus what surrounds it: superscript i (86), a (33), e (5), o (3), m (2), and a dedicated ur mark (U+1DD1, 7).
This primer has no expert reviewer (registry/languages/old-french.toml, expert = ""). It was written from counted evidence plus the transcribers' own conventions, by a reader of Latin and Greek and not of Old French. Specifically:
ꝑdu =perdu, uꝰ = vous, q̃ = que, mõ = mon — because the same words appear elsewhere in full.
st̾ occurs 14× and is deliberately not expanded here. I could not settle it from theevidence, and a confident wrong expansion is worse than an admitted gap.
distribution of the two marks. A medievalist should confirm it means what I have said.
thirteenth-century French, and a psalter or a charter would count differently.
The Latin and Greek tracks assume you read the language and teach you only the ink. Old French is the first track where that assumption fails for most readers. Minims especially cannot be resolved without knowing what word is possible, so the ink and the language are not cleanly separable in practice.
If you need the language, the best free course is the University of Texas Linguistics Research Center's Old French Online — ten lessons built on real texts (Roland, Tristan, Yvain), with grammar and glossaries: https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/ofrol
⁊ = et, q̃ = que, ꝑ = par. That is 637instances, over a third of all abbreviation in the corpus.
uꝰ = vous and ꝯ = con-, which are two words and a prefix.Biblissima+), CC BY 4.0 — https://github.com/CIHAM-HTR/Fabliaux
Manuscripts*, CREMMALAB, 2022 (hal-03697382)
Practise this hand: Old French — a book of fabliaux