[split] EVA-y as Latin "-us" etc.

[MarcoP]

One can always argue about the validity of statistics, but the problem with this one (the very high fraction of words ending in y ) is that it is so far off from any reasonable number for Latin words ending in -us or -um or even combined, that there is no chance for a match.

Just from memory, if the language were Italian, then a word-final -i  would be a lot closer in terms of frequency.
Maybe Marco remembers better.

Hi Rene,
I remember nothing of those measures, so I computed new stats from scratch.

• -y in the VMS, Currier_A : 33% Currier_B : 46%
  
• Italian -i : 18%
  
• Latin -um: 7%   -us: 6% (combined 13%)
  

Unless I messed up something, Italian -i is not terribly higher than Latin -us/-um combined.
Anyway all these figures are extremely different from those in the VMS. As you say, there cannot be any simple match.

The y symbol in Latin represents con/com at the beginnings of words and us/um at the ends of words.

Hi JKP,
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. says something different: -y for -um is not mentioned. He represents the second as a superscript, but we know that also the final symbol often was on the same line as the rest of the word.

   

Also You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of the University of Nottingham mentions con/com for y-, but only -us for -y.

I would be interested in examining some of the manuscripts where you saw -y representing -um. I wonder if this occurred together with -y representing -us: this could result in some difficulty for the reader, since both endings are very frequent and -us words usually have an -um counterpart which is grammatically different (e.g. accusative vs nominative, or neuter vs masculine).

Could you please point out a few examples of -y representing -um, so that I can have a look at the context and the overall abbreviation style by those scribes?