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Sign No. 1. The mark which is most often used to indicate suspension or contraction, without attempting to suggest the specific letter or letters omitted, is made above the abbreviated word. Over a period covering many generations of scribes it is very variously shaped, the extreme of its elaboration being the 'papal knot', illustrated below in the abbreviations of Andegavie and episcopus, which was imported into English use about 1180 and enjoyed some vogue for the next thirty years or so. The predominant form, however, is a horizontal or near-horizontal dash set over short letters and passing through the ascenders of tall ones. In early documents this sign, whatever form it takes, is a separate stroke of the pen, made with some deliberation, but from the 13th century it is increasingly often found, especially in suspensions, as a mere extension upward and backward of the letter last written before it. |
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Sign No. 2. This is not, in the overwhelming majority of English documents, a discernibly different sign from No. 1, but a distinctive or special use of it. Placed above vowels it indicates the omission of one or more nasal consonants (m, n). By reducing the number of minims in the line of writing it may thus be an aid to reading. In heres, clericus, the adjective liber, and their derivatives, and in a few other words, this sign is drawn through the ascenders of h, l, and b to represent suppressed er. |
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Sign No. 3. A general mark of abbreviation frequent in 12th-century documents consists of a vertical wavy line, somewhat like a crude narrow S. In the second half of the century this mark was increasingly often chosen to replace er and re (a function previously discharged by a short horizontal stroke or one resembling a short-stemmed Arabic 7). By the 13th century it had assumed the shape, which it long retained, of a backwardcurve terminating in a bold pendent comma, and was so regularly used in contractions suppressing er and re that it is often described as the ' er (re) abbreviation '. In so far as no other superior sign (except No. 2 in the few instances above mentioned) specifically replaces these letters,. the description is justified. Exceptionally this sign can have the value of ir (ri) ; and in one word-uxor-it is regularly written for or. But it never ceased to be usable as an entirely general mark of abbreviation ; and especially in suspensions it will often be found so used. In later documents, when its size and definiteness have been reduced and it may be only an inconspicuous addition to the letter to which it is linked, its presence is sometimes easy to overlook. |
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Sign No. 4. A superior mark which may often be likened to a small single-bowled a with a curving tail-like appendage (but which admits of substantial variation from this form) is to be read as equivalent to ur or, on very rare occasions, ru. It is used in both suspension and contraction |
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Sign No. 5. Final us.is consistently indicated by a superior sign which, within fairly wide limits, may be said to resemble an Arabic 9. This sign is not really common as a mark of contraction except in formations like ejusdem and cujusdam, but when it does occur medially its value may be either us or os. Its use in abbreviating post and compounds containing post is noticed below |
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Sign No. 6. In outline this mark (standing for con- or com-) often resembles No. 5, but differs from it in always appearing in the line of writing, in which it is normally ranged with the descending letters. For the reader there is sometimes a risk of confusion between it and the letter q. |
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Sign No. 7. This sign, which in early post-Conquest documents retains its original appearance, that of a modern semicolon, soon developed a cursive form reminiscent of an Arabic 3. In some 14th-century and later hands there is no observable difference between it and the letter -. It is always a mark of suspension placed in the line of writing, and in English practice is almost confined to the truncation of two classes of words : the first, datives and ablatives in -bus, in which it replaces the final ~; the second, words ending inthe enclitic or suffix -que, in which it replaces the final ue. In some few words its function is general : the comnionest are compounds of fibet and licet (viz., as an abbreviation of videlicet, has survived to our own times), but s3, p3, d3, representing set (= sed), patet, debet, are all found, the first of them being especially frequent. |
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Sign No. 8. Words suspended at a letter whose concluding stroke, on or near the base-line, is approximately horizontal commonly carry, as a sign that they are suspended,an obliquely curving mark through this final stroke. The letter k, in some of its forms, and the capital R particularly lent themselves to this treatment, of which the medical prescriber's 1~ (a suspension of Recipe) is a surviving example. The letter, however, which in practice most often carried this mark of suspension was the so-called ' Arabic-2 ' small r, which was the form of r consistently written after the round-bodied letters a and o. Genitiveplurals of the first and second declensions, employing this r and suspended at the earliest point at which the grammatical case had been made apparent, provide by far the commonest occasions for the use of this sign-so much the commonest that the Arabic-2 r carrying it came quite early to be regarded as a ' significant symbol' for -rm, and the truncated forms of Saresb??&ia and Blandford Forinseca, for example, were wrongly extended to Sarm and Blandford For- |
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Sign No. 9. A looped vertical mark of suspension frequent from the 14th century onwards has a purely general function in Latin-language docments. The letters to which it is most often attached are d, f, and g. Though it is in origin and by position a sign of suspension, its use in the common late abbreviation of quod is really to mark a contraction. Its value in English-language writing is mentioned below (p. 37). |
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The marks associated with the letters p and q are worthy of special attention. The words pro, per, pre, and post, and compounds containing them, are by most writers so carefully distinguished in abbreviation that in any one document the reader has seldom any excuse for confusing their appearance. He should note that in company with p Sign No. 3 stands invariably for re, and never for er. Sign No. 5 is used with p to provide an abbreviation for post, commoner in early documents than late ones. The per abbreviation also does duty, notably in pars and its numerous derivatives, for par, and in the oblique cases of tempus and corpus for por. Beginners often have difficulty with the group of abbreviations involving the letter q, and are particularly apt to render the compendia for quando (q~) and quoniam erroneously as quin and qum. This last is in fact a spelling unknown to the medieval Latinist, who always writes cum for preposition and conjunction alike. |
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| The abbreviation 7h-s 3pT, or 7h-c Tp-c, for the name of Jesus Christ arises from the practice of reproducing in Latin texts the contracted form of the Greek 1HCOYC .XPICTOC. Xp is also used for Chr(ist-) in the abbreviation of the derivatives Christianus, Christopherus, etc. ; and in early post-Conquest documents contractions of spiritus and episcopus sometimes feature a final c which has the value of a Greek sigma. |
| Words reduced by abbreviation
to a single letter are sometimes called sigla. Some of them bear no abbreviative
tittle but are preceded and followed by a full point. The commonest words
so treated in English documents (apart from Christian names represented
only by their initial letters) are scilicet (.s.), id est (.i.), and ~im
(.n.). Hoc is rendered by h surmounted by a dot (h), to be distinguished
from h traversed by Sign No. 1, which stands for hec. The single letter
1 traversed by the same sign replaces veL
Contraction is often indicated by the use of superscript letters. These letters may, in a fashion still current, simply represent the termination or an important constituent of the contracted word, as in ml (= michi), t'(~ tibi), vo (= vero), m" (= modo), u' (= ubi), and in the more surprising ga, gi ' g', which stand respectively for erga, igitur, and ergo. But vowels (much the commonest are a and i) may also be written above abbreviated word to suggest the suppression of the letter r before, or, very rarely, after, the superscript vo~l. Thus t~ns = t-s, p'or ~ prior, Oce~ ~ crucem, iccco = iccirco. Any of the vowels, except u may be placed above q and in this position argues the omission of preceding u. Thus qam = qu-, qppe = quippe,
qO = quo. It is worth remarking that by most scribes
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