Come cambia la scrittura

Reflection on the mechanisms of change by examining two essential moments of the history of Latin writing: the transition to the modern graphic system and the graphic renovation of Humanism. To say that a language has changed, it is not enough to note that it has been enriched by new words or that, on the contrary, it has become lexically impoverished. Thus, for the graphic system, we can say that it is enriched with new forms - for example more or less rapid variations, during the first Romanesque period - or that, on the other hand, its morphological heritage is impoverished without that the writing changes - what happened, between the X and the XII century, for the writings of the Italian documents -. The phenomenon is even more obvious when it is about one or more scribes, in a given area, who take initiatives within a graphic system on which they depend. These individual choices - or shared - do not imply a general change. The graphic change must be seen as an irreversible fixation, as a normalization of a series of graphic phenomena, where the return to the previous forms is not possible, unless it is act of a programmed return to a previous system. The processes of change are, themselves, a product of history and conditioned by history: which means that change is done, each time, in different ways and with different purposes.