A chairde / Friends, Did Gaelic scribes take shorthand? The answer is yes, but using their own system called nodanna. Gaelic scribes had to be able to copy a lot of manuscripts, and quickly. So they developed their own shorthand system using literally hundreds of symbols. So the problems we have translating almost all the old manuscripts which come down to us (including the one which John has kindly shown us this week) include damage to them (blackened with age), difference in alphabet (the g, r, s, d, and t are different, and h can be represented by a dot over the preceding consonant), and the fact that many or most or all of these old manuscripts are written in nodanna (Gaelic shorthand symbols). This shorthand writing system was used right into the 19th century, when Gaelic manuscripts finally began to be published using the printing press. Rather than come up with new hot-lead fonts containing hundreds of these additional ancient characters, the printers of that period decided it would be better to translate the shorthand back into the longhand and then print the longhand. The only nodanna which survived that process were the dot over the consonant to indicate an h after the consonant, the accent mark on the vowel (for example, á actually means aa), and 7 which comes from the Latin et and means agus (the word 'and' in English). I think there's a master list of nodanna on the internet somewhere but I couldn't find it this morning. But you can see a few examples at the bottom of http://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_shorthand.htm . There you'll see how to write cearr, lom, domhnall, son, peann, cúlaibh, lár, barr, athair, cóir, lucht, and agus using nodanna. A good place to get a very detailed feel for this is Timothy O'Neill's "The Irish Hand" (Dolmen Press, 1984). Timothy doesn't provide a master list either, but because of his many photographs of legible passages and long-form transcription of those passages, you can begin to develop your own list. Some years back, I was up to well over a hundred nodanna when I ran out of time and had to abandon the project. Best, Jerry Cló an Druaidh / The Druid Press <http://www.druidpress.com> www.druidpress.com