Titlo
Encyclopedia
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
symbol initially used in old Cyrillic manuscripts, e.g., in Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Church Slavic was the first literary Slavic language, first developed by the 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius who were credited with standardizing the language and using it for translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek...
and Old East Slavic
Old East Slavic language
Old East Slavic or Old Ruthenian was a language used in 10th-15th centuries by East Slavs in the Kievan Rus' and states which evolved after the collapse of the Kievan Rus...
languages. The word is a borrowing from the Greek "", "title" (compare dated English tittle
Tittle
A tittle is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic or the dot on a lowercase i or j. The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of i and j, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages...
, see tilde
Tilde
The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Portuguese and Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics....
). The titlo still appears in inscriptions on modern icons and in service books printed in Church Slavonic.
The titlo is drawn as a zigzag line over a text. The usual form is short stroke up, falling slanted line, short stroke up; an alternative is like a sideways square bracket: short stroke up, horizontal line, short stroke down.
The titlo has several meanings depending on the context:
One meaning is in its use to mark letters when they are used as numerals
Cyrillic numerals
The Cyrillic numerals are a numbering system derived from the Cyrillic script, used by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used in Russia as late as the early 18th century when Peter the Great replaced it with Arabic numerals....
. This is a quasi-decimal system analogous to Greek numerals
Greek numerals
Greek numerals are a system of representing numbers using letters of the Greek alphabet. They are also known by the names Ionian numerals, Milesian numerals , Alexandrian numerals, or alphabetic numerals...
.
Another meaning is in its use as an over-text abbreviation mark used for frequently written long words and also for nouns describing sacred persons. In place of «богъ», for example, «» (God) was written under the titlo and «глаголетъ» ([he] speaks) is abbreviated as «». Fig. 3 shows a list of the most common of these abbreviations in current use in printed Church Slavonic. Fig. 2 shows «Господь» (Lord) abbreviated to its first letter and stem ending (also a single letter here, in the nominative case). Around the XVth century, titla in most schools came to be restricted to a special semiotic meaning, used exclusively to refer to sacred concepts, while the same words were otherwise spelled out without titla, and so, for example, while "God" in the sense of the one true God is abbreviated as above, "god" referring to "false" gods is spelled out; likewise, while the word for "angel" is generally abbreviated, “angels” is spelled out “performed by evil angels” in Psalm 77. This corresponds to the Nomina sacra
Nomina sacra
Nomina sacra means "sacred names" in Latin, and can be used to refer to traditions of abbreviated writing of several frequently occurring divine names or titles in early Greek language Holy Scripture...
(Latin: "Sacred names") tradition of using contractions for certain frequently occurring names in Greek
Koine Greek
Koine Greek is the universal dialect of the Greek language spoken throughout post-Classical antiquity , developing from the Attic dialect, with admixture of elements especially from Ionic....
Scriptures.
A short titlo is placed over a single letter or over an entire abbreviation; a long titlo is placed over a whole word.
A further meaning was in its use in manuscripts, where the titlo was often used to mark the place where a scribe accidentally skipped the letter, if there was no space to draw the missed letter above.
Titlo is encoded in Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
as .