Talk:Minim (palaeography)

old talk
I have strong doubts about the etymology proposed here, that the name of the letter shapes should be derived from the name of the scribes (i.e. the religious order?) - but I must find some references first. Lukas 07:59, 4 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, now that I looked at it again, I tend to think the whole article is just a silly joke anyway. Lukas 15:40, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, I don't know what this is. A minim is just the least complicated vertical stroke you can make in handwriting, from the Latin "minimum", which just means "least" or "smallest". Adam Bishop 17:57, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

I replaced the article with some discussion of minims taken from my palaeography notes, and from other articles. Adam Bishop 19:44, 4 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Great work, Adam. This is much better.  And Lukas is right - the bit about the scribes themselves being called Minims was rubbish.  --Doric Loon 20:24, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Famous "letter"
In the late middle ages, a cheerfully transparently phoney letter in Latin -- ostensibly a letter of petition from the actors ("mimes") of a city to a Roman emperor -- was composed in order to be a reasonable-length text composed almost exclusively of minim strokes; I'm not having much luck Googling it, but I think it's fairly well known in the context of the subject matter of the article, and should be mentioned here... AnonMoos (talk) 11:52, 3 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Translation: In a book I saw "mimi numinum niuium minimi munium nimium uini muniminum imminui uiui minimum uolunt" translated as "the smallest mimes of the gods of snow do not wish at all in their life that the great duty of the wine of the defences be diminished" :: the wine was from grapes grown near the walls of Rome. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 23:06, 3 June 2016 (UTC) The actors may have been relying the extra pay that they were paid for looking after the vines. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 16:14, 2 July 2016 (UTC)


 * It's probably a different example from the one I saw decades ago (or is missing some surrounding explanatory context), but it does the job... AnonMoos (talk) 02:19, 17 August 2019 (UTC)