Text and context

[RenegadeHealer]

I cannot say whether this spelling was adopted from Slavic. Perhaps cvetkakocj knows more about this.

You know, I've always wanted to read that y at the beginning of that marginalia as "and". After all, y is indeed the word for "and" in several widely spoken standard Romance and Eastern Slavic languages. In all cases these are ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European root *h₁eti. I scoured Wiktionary looking for any reflexes of *h₁eti in Proto-Germanic and its descendants, used as their word for "and" or a similar conjunction. There are indeed reflexes of this root in the Germanic languages, but they're truer to the root's original meaning as a demonstrative pronoun. I could find none that were glossed as "and", or any other conjunction.

As multilingual and cosmopolitan as Alpine south-central Europe was in the XV century, I have a hard time imagining Spanish-isms or Ukrainian-isms creeping into locals' speech and writing there.

As a lifelong word nerd and geography nerd, I'm very curious to find out where this one location and dialect where German speakers used y for "and". I'm also curious what the etymology of this oddly out-of-place local variant is.