bi3, I've been thinking about Anton's point about abbreviated text.
If there were an alternate text with abbreviations, which ones should they be?
- There were zillions of abbreviations.
- The VMS seems more consistent than inconsistent (there are many common patterns repeated throughout the manuscript).
- Not all scribes abbreviated heavily.
So, my thought was, there were certain abbreviations that almost everyone used. Maybe it would be helpful to have a list of those.
The extremely common ones in numerous languages were
- y (con- com- -us -um)
- p with a strike through the descender (per-)
- p with a loop through the descender (pro-)
- -by (usually stood for -bus)
- dz or bz (rotated "m" that looks like zee usually stood for -em or -um and its homonyms and lazy scribes sometimes used it for -rum)
- 4 ("-rum" symbol is actually an "r" with a fancy tail but looks a bit like a modern 4 with an open top)
- a symbol that looks like 2 (usually superscripted) represented -ur or -tur
- k (abbreviation for Item in Latin, Italian, German, Czech, and English but sometimes meant other things in other languages)
- -ris/-tis/-cis/-gis - this is actually just an -is symbol, a loop with a tail, added to various letters. They resemble VMS g and m.
- The "smoke" symbol (a wiggly, vertical, or hooked macron) usually represented re/er/ir/ri (in early medieval manuscripts this was drawn like an upside-down EVA-l in later medieval, it was like a smoke symbol, a straight macron, or a curved macron, depending on scribe)
- The macron, or curved macron indicated missing letters. There was usually no difference in meaning between straight or curved macrons, scribes did whatever was comfortable to write. The macron most often represented m or n but it could be almost anything, including multiple letters. It could also cut through ascenders.
- The tail was in a sense a connected macron. If the missing letters were near the end of the word, it was easier to draw a tail rather than lifting the pen and drawing a line over the letters.
The Latin language also included the following common ones
- single-or double-character abbreviations for the very common "q" words like qui, quo, quodam, quomodo, quibus, etc., which were usually a q with a strike-through or loop through the stem, a small "o" or the common bz (-bus) ending
Spanish very often included a c or co abbreviation for con (this sometimes shows up in other languages, as well).
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Even if a scribe used abbreviations sparingly, they usually used the ones above. In fact,
y was so common, it was sometimes added to the end of the alphabet in pen tests. Note that it was added to the end of the alphabet on VMS You are not allowed to view links.
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There is also evidence in the VMS, that whoever designed appears to have been familiar with
9, m g, macrons, and tail abbreviations (even if they mean something different in the VMS).
This might seem like a lot of abbreviations, but it's actually only a dozen or so that most scribes used fairly consistently even if they didn't use the others.