Scribal abbreviations were used by medieval scribes writing in Latin. These were a set of conventional marks to save themselves parchment, ink, and time. These often consisted of tildes, macrons, and marks that resembled apostrophes above letters. Other modifications included cross-bars and extended strokes. Such abbreviations were mostly for prefixes and verb, noun, and adjectival suffixes. They are not to be confused with the forms of abbreviation that do not use unusual marks, some of which have survived, such as i.e., loc. cit. (viz, however, is actually an abbreviation for "videlicet", vi + an abbreviation mark resembling the letter z or the number 3).
Scribal abbreviations have entered the news in the twenty-first century because the recently revived Scottish Parliament needs to find out what the old codes of Scottish law written in Latin say. Those who have learned Latin without having also learned Latin palaeography find these abbreviations incomprehensible. At a recent count, there were well over fourteen thousand abbreviations.
Besides scribal abbreviations, in old texts one will find some variant characters including digraphs, the long s, and the half r, which are difficult enough to understand. "U" and "v", and "i" and "j", were not distinguished from each other in medieval writing. Nowadays, variant letters and the scribal abbreviations are systematically replaced with the full Latin spellings by most publishers who still print Latin works, and the confusable letters are rendered such that the characters "j" and "v" are not used for vowels.
One remaining scribal abbreviation is the ampersand, for the Latin (or French) word, et, meaning "and". There were several other ways of writing the word et; one, derived from the ancient Latin Tironian note, resembles an Arabic numeral "7", though at x-height. Although in the nineteenth century, the way to write an ampersand was taught, it is no longer mandated.
Technically, the ampersand (&) is a ligature. When printing with movable type appeared in the fifteenth century, founders made many different ligatures to go with each set of type they produced. Such sets were called "record type". Manuscripts of ancient Greek, a language that entered Western Europe with the Renaissance, used similar abbreviations which had to be converted into ligatures as well. This was to imitate the scribal form of writing to which the readership was accustomed. But the scribal abbreviations did not apply to the vernacular languages of Europe. As works got published in these languages, a development that is often imagined as being due to the Reformation, scribal abbreviations disappeared.
