the 9 or g

[-JKP-]

I can't do an exhaustive search right now, but here are some examples I pulled from my files to indicate how the "g" shapes and "9" shapes (as a number and as an abbreviation) were typically written in Gothic hands. Note that Italic is a different style but the same general principles apply in the way the g was written to distinguish it from number 9 and abbreviation 9:



You can ignore the Roman numeral in the third column. I didn't have time to filter it out. This was a quick grab.

One thing that's interesting is that even early medieval texts used these shapes, consistent with Arabic numerals, as abbreviations, even though many were still using Roman numerals in the main text and for foliation and charts.