Finding parallels for Month Names handwriting (Work in Progress)

[Jorge_Stolfi]

What interests me is not April itself, but how it was written: ‘dabril’ (d'abril, de abril).The ‘d’ is attached to the word in exactly the same way as I have seen in Venetian: ‘daqua’ (d'aqua, de aqua).

Several Romance languages contract prepositions with some articles and other words: French "du", Italian "nella", etc.   Spanish does not seem to do that much, but Portuguese goes to the other extreme.  Not only with dozens of function words -- "pra", "num", "neles", "disso", "daqui", "naquele", ... -- but also some common words, like "d'água" = "of water".  Although in the last case the modern spelling requires an apostrophe.  The "d'abril" is still seen and heard, although more in Portugal than in Brazil, and it may be ceding space to "de abril" in any formal setting.

All the best, --jorge