Re: Magna Carta sealed (15-6-1215)

Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:

And the linguistic angle is...
"The original is written in medieval Latin, as was normal for official
documents at the time..."
And this goes on to scribal abbreviations, which were also normal at the
time:
 
"...in Magna Carta _and_* was written as a dash with a small tail, _per_
('of') could appear as a letter <p> with a crossbar on the descender,
and _nostra_ ('our') was written <nra> with a horizontal line above."
 
*He should really have written: _et_ ('and').
 
(Something that came up quite recently in the excerpt from the Chronicle
about the Danes sacking Lindisfarne):
 
"A symbol that looked like the numeral 7 was very frequent in
Anglo-Saxon texts as a replacement for _and_: it derives from the symbol
used in classical Latin for _et_ ('and') by Cicero's scribe, Marcus
Tullius Tiro (and thus often called the 'Tironian _et_')."
As Aidan knew.
 

I imagine he didn't write _et_ because unlike the others it wasn't
[recognisably] a derivation of the latin word (and it's implied it was used
in english texts).

Seldom has a less useful remark than this here of mine been published to
sci.lang, of course.