Slide 7 of 26
Notes:
Let is look at an instance of the living together of the first two of these by pretending that the following is a fifteenth-century manuscript.
The reader with any Latin surviving from school days will probably be able to puzzle out the “charitas” and the “vere” but will begin to stumble over the “spus” and “scus,” and be totally lost in no time. Why? Because of all of the abbreviations. The surface explanation of this phenomenon is that parchment, and later paper, were expensive and that it was necessary or desirable to economize, to conserve space with abbreviations. While this may be true, the abbreviations would not have been possible if the audience did not know well in advance what the full words were. This document was not meant to be a complete phonetic representation of the Latin language.
