Dear all,

I'm adressing you in matters which are note digital-medievalist in particular, but merely medievalist in nature.

There is a well known abbreviature, in the shape of a 9 shifted to sit on the base-line with it's o-component with the tail featuring as a descender (like the regular 9 in old-style numerals, e.g. in the Georgia font). [It is encoded in Unicode as U+A76F LATIN SMALL LETTER CON, but I won't use it in this e-mail, as font support is poor. Below in the message a 9 (nine) will mean the character without further explanation].

This abbreviature was used alone meaning Latin "cum", alone with a further abbreviation mark similar to a tilde "con[tra]". In the beginning of words the prefix "con-" and its assimilated forms (cor-, com-, etc. as in corruptio, commemorabilis, etc.). In Cental European manuscripts and incunabula (German, Czech, Hungarian,...), at the end of a string, however it stood for "-us".*

I have come upon a manuscript (first quarter of the 16th c.), where a lonesome 9 could potentially be interpreted as meaning 'correction' or similar. However, I am hesitant with this reading, as I have not found such an expansion of the sole 9 in any reference work so far. (And, like with the tilde of "con[tra]" I'd be expecting further signs of abbreviation).

However, I'm particularly intrigued by the fact, that in certain traditions of editing (19th, 20th c.), corrections by the editor are indicated by a turned c, e.g. such: "... plunia (ɔ: pluvia) ...". While to my knowledge this is usually read as "recte: ..." ('correctly:...'), I could not help noticing that it could be interpreted as "correctio: ..." ('correction: ...') and that in medieval times ɔ was a common allograph of the 9 meaning con-, etc. (for that cf. e.g. Cappelli).

Could it be, that the lonesome 9 of the mentioned manuscript indeed stands for "correction" (and that the modern (ɔ:...) stens from the same tradition)? Did you encounter in your work single 9-s meaning something from the semantic field of errors and corrections? Can you help me with corroborating data from your research experience?

Thank you in advance for your insightful answers,   André Sz. Szelp

__ * Cappelli, who has sampled mostly Italian and French manuscripts only knows the raised small 9-shaped sign for "-us" (the predecessor of the apostrophe sign), and attributes to the baseline form only the cum, con- meaning. However there are myriads of examples of baseline-9 final -us in German incunabula and manuscripts.