04-10-2022, 05:58 PM
I'm going to guess that numeronyms didn't exist before the information age. They make no sense in a handwritten non-technological age.
Now, the occasional abbreviation, sure, scribes didn't mind them
Isopsephy or gematria? Help yourself.
But no medieval scribe ever thought of writing dog as K9 or the turn of the millennium as Y2K. And I think the great vowel shift would have caused a lot of them to be unintelligible, even if they had.
Proof of that is that it's only modern English that seems to have them. In other languages, they tend to be notable dates rather than linguistic shorthand (Spanish are bloody terrible with them, they use them as linguistic shorthand for all sorts of important dates - just what you would expect from a Catholic nation obsessed by telling the passing of time using the Saint's calendar).
Now, the occasional abbreviation, sure, scribes didn't mind them
Isopsephy or gematria? Help yourself.
But no medieval scribe ever thought of writing dog as K9 or the turn of the millennium as Y2K. And I think the great vowel shift would have caused a lot of them to be unintelligible, even if they had.
Proof of that is that it's only modern English that seems to have them. In other languages, they tend to be notable dates rather than linguistic shorthand (Spanish are bloody terrible with them, they use them as linguistic shorthand for all sorts of important dates - just what you would expect from a Catholic nation obsessed by telling the passing of time using the Saint's calendar).