Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

Morten St. George: On another matter, I've been checking out the Lexicon Abbreviaturarum (highly recommended to me by Paris) and, so far, I've been unable to find a single instance of the use of superscript "m9" anywhere in medieval Europe. It seems they could combine the "9" with almost anything except an "m",

Keep looking, Morten. They are out there.



Whether the "m" was superscripted was a matter of personal choice of the scribe and sometimes dependent on which number they were abbreviating (for example, in English we say 1st with "st" and 4th with "th"). It really didn't matter if it was superscripted, that was at the scribe's discretion. Some superscripted only the 9, some the last two letters, some didn't superscript at all.

There are abbreviations where the "m" was superscripted and they didn't add the 9 (see examples bottom-left) Sometimes they used superscripted t9 instead of m9. It depended partly on which language they were using (Latin, French or German, for example) and how many letters they wanted to superscript.



Here are some examples of ordinals abbreviated. Note that there is quite a bit of variation in the seven different examples of "primus". Sometimes "m" or "t9" was used (depending on number and language). Each of these is from a different manuscript: