The Sigla

The sigla in Joyce’s manuscripts began as simple abbreviations for the names of characters. Certain inhabitants of FW have been recognized for a long time: Frank Budgen explains that FW only concerns a few people: H. C. Earwicker and his wife Anna Livia Piurabelle, their two sons Shem and Shaun, their daughter Issy, four old men and twelve jurors. In the manuscripts these characters bear the sigla , , , , ,  and  respectively. (McHugh)

I would suggest the following fourteen sigla as constituting a fundamental alphabet for future studies […] Admittedly this is incomplete […] Unfortunately, despite my differentiation of the sigla in this account, there is no absolute determinant as to what is, or what is not, a siglum in the manuscripts. (McHugh)

                          

                         

Unicode

To encode the Sigla (and various fontly called) as part of a unicode font each requires; a code point, name, and glyph. The table below provides a starting point, situated in the Private Use Area (U+F401 to U+F471), and may eventually find it's way to somewhere in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane.

code point	name	glyph	notes
	Fundamental alphabet		McHugh
U+F401	SIGLUM HCE		HCE, Doodles family. 299.F4
U+F402	SIGLUM ALP		ALP
U+F403	SIGLUM SHEM		Shem
U+F404	SIGLUM SHAUN		Shan
U+F405	SIGLUM ISSY		Issy
U+F406	SIGLUM T	
U+F407	SIGLUM YAWN		Shem-Shaun, Patrick, *
U+F408	SIGLUM CIRCLE		The Twelve
U+F409	SIGLUM ELIPSE		The Twenty-Eight
U+F40A	SIGLUM SQUARE		Square
U+F40B	SIGLUM MANDALA		Mandala
U+F40C	SIGLUM X		The Four
U+F40D	SIGLUM S		Jo
U+F40E	SIGLUM K		Kate
	Variations		grouped by context and/or appearance(?)
U+F40F	ROTATED CAPITAL F 1		018.36
U+F410	ROTATED CAPITAL F 2		121.03 (THIN?)
U+F411	ROTATED CAPITAL F 3		121.07 (THIN?)
U+F412	ROTATED CAPITAL F 4	
U+F413	REFLECTED CAPITAL F 1		266.22
U+F414	REFLECTED CAPITAL F 2		-
U+F415			-
U+F416			-
U+F417	ROTATED CAPITAL E 1	
U+F418	ROTATED CAPITAL E 2	
U+F419	ROTATED CAPITAL E 3		036.xx
U+F41A
	THIN variants		see: A Modest Proposal for a Wake typeface
U+F420
U+F421	THIN SIGLUM HCE		119.17 "baffling chrismon trilithon sign "
U+F422	THIN SIGLUM ALP		119.19 "the smaller "
U+F423	THIN SIGLUM SHEM	
U+F424	THIN SIGLUM SHAUN	
U+F425	THIN SIGLUM ISSY	
U+F426	THIN SIGLUM T	
U+F427	THIN SIGLUM YAWN	
U+F428	THIN SIGLUM CIRCLE	
U+F429	THIN SIGLUM ELIPSE	
U+F42A	THIN SIGLUM SQUARE	
U+F42B	THIN SIGLUM MANDALA	
U+F42C	THIN SIGLUM X	
U+F42D	THIN SIGLUM S	
U+F42E	THIN SIGLUM K	
U+F42F
	Special and singletons
U+F430	MUSIC		044.25 (rather typeset as music?)
U+F431	MUSIC		272.L02
U+F433	EUCLIDEAN FIGURE		293.12
U+F434	FW FIGURE 1		308.L17
U+F435	FW FIGURE 2		308.L18
U+F440	THIN RF 1	
U+F441	THIN RF 2	
U+F442	THIN RF 3	
U+F443	THIN RF 4	
U+F444	THIN RF 5	
U+F445	THIN RF 6	
U+F446	THIN RF 7	
U+F447	THIN RF 8	
U+F448	THIN ROTATED HCE 1	
U+F449	THIN ROTATED HCE 2	
U+F44A	THIN ROTATED HCE 3	
U+F44B	SIGLA MISC	
U+F44C	SIGLA MISC	
U+F44D	SIGLA MISC	
U+F44E	SIGLA MISC	
U+F44F	SIGLA MISC	
U+F450	SIGLA MISC	
U+F451	SIGLA MISC	
U+F452	SIGLA MISC	
U+F453	SIGLA MISC	
U+F454	SIGLA MISC	
U+F455	SIGLA MISC	
U+F456	SIGLA MISC	
U+F457	SIGLA MISC	
U+F458	SIGLA MISC	
U+F459	SIGLA MISC	
U+F45A	SIGLA MISC	
U+F45B	SIGLA MISC	
U+F45C	SIGLA MISC	
U+F45D	SIGLA MISC	
U+F45E	SIGLA MISC	
U+F45F	SIGLA MISC	
U+F460	SIGLA MISC	
U+F461	SIGLA MISC	
U+F462	SIGLA MISC	
U+F463	SIGLA MISC	
U+F464	SIGLA MISC	
U+F465	SIGLA MISC	
U+F466	SIGLA MISC	
U+F467	SIGLA MISC	
U+F468	SIGLA MISC	
U+F469	SIGLA MISC	
U+F46A	SIGLA MISC	
U+F46B	SIGLA MISC	
U+F46C	SIGLA MISC	
U+F46D	SIGLA MISC	
U+F46E	SIGLA MISC	
U+F46F	SIGLA MISC	
U+F470	SIGLA MISC	
U+F471	SIGLA MISC	

• "Mick, Nick the Maggot or whatever your name is" 399.26

Fonts & faces

I'm aware of two previous fonts, which both use ASCII overloading (i.e. LATIN & SIGLUM are indistinguishable) to represent the sigla. Fweet Figla contains 18 sigla and Ian Gunn's Wake typeface includes many more. There are also some suggestions on finnegansweb about using existing glyphs to represent the sigla.

The primary advantage of unicode encoding is to enable a single font to typeset the text, accents and various sigla. It also enables the sigla to be located within the text (e.g. search by character) and uniquely identified (typographically at least).

FweetFig.TTF font

WAKE2.TTF font

Riverrun

The Riverrun font uses images from scanned text and glyphs from WAKE2 TTF font imported into FontForge with the unicode range from the table above.

Blue Lagoon

To create a single font for typesetting the text, accents, symbols, and sigla, it's possible to merge the glyphs from Riverrun into another font (e.g. using 'Element > Merge Font' in FontForge). The font Blue Lagoon was created by merging Cormorant with Riverrun.

order and appearances

Joyce’s technique of personality condensation is ultimately inseparable from his linguistic condensation. Coincidences of orthography and pronunciation are enforced with indifference to the ostensible logic of their past. That which is not coincidence is pared away, and the greater the similarity of two persons’ names, the more usefully their personalities conjugate. Before the onset of the effect I called psychic saturation, the reader’s mind dictates its own limits of credulity towards the range of different meanings that Joyce intended any word or unit to encompass. Clearly, no two people will draw the line at precisely the same point, and even the same person on different occasions will place it differently. To be strict, it is less a line than a zone of apathy dividing stimulus from vacuum. With reiterated textual experience, the limits first contract, then widen. It is however possible to ignore the aesthetic commitment and theoretically to unite any unit with any gloss,

—Roland McHugh, The sigla of Finnegans wake

page 18

page 36

page 44

page 119

[119.17] & [119.19]

page 121

page 124

[124.8-12]

a ssan dspl itch ina, — Yard inquiries pointed out → that they
ad bîn “provoked” ay  fork, of a grave Brofèsor; àth é’s Brèak
— fast — table; ; acùtely profèššionally piquéd, to = introdtùce a
notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù’ ’fàc’e’] by pùnct! ingh oles
(sic) in iSpace?! Deeply religious by nature and position, and

page 266

page 272

page 293

As a unicode character 

page 299

[299.F4]

The Doodles family, ,,,,,,. Hoodle doodle, fam.?

page 308

 1. Kish is for anticheirst, and the free of my hand to him!

1. And gags for skool, and crossbuns and whopes he’ll enjoyimsolff over

 our drawings on the line!

c.f. In Byzantine-era Greek, many "nomina sacra" were abbreviated, e.g David (Δαυίδ) as ΔΑΔ, or Mother of Jesus, (Μήτηρ) as ΜΗΡ or ΜΡΣ.

Further

The difficulty of absorbing FW results not merely from the highly fragmented nature of its text but also from the fragmented nature of the absorption process itself. In reading FW one makes a succession of isolated discoveries pertaining to various disciplines and stationed randomly throughout the volume. Appearing in no special order, they are soon forgotten unless some form of cataloguing is attempted, which is an occupation repugnant to most persons in search of aesthetic ends. (McHugh)

• Roland McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake. 1976.
• John Dee, Monas Hieroglyphica. 1564.
• The Sigla on finnegans web