Re: The World

181
Hi, Julian,

this word is an abbreviation, indicated by the dash over the /o/. The scribe uses the same abbreviation for "pontifex", in the phrase "O pōtifex cur & c.", for "O pontifex cur etc." (O Pontifex (Papa, Pope), why?"), in the second line of the Papessa entry, Other examples in the names of the Triumphs are the /p/ dashed in the descender in "Impator" (Imperator), and "Impatrix" (Imperatrix).

A dash over a vowel is the most common way to abbreviate an /n/ or /m/.

Above the list, you can see from Kaplan's photograph that the whole text is highly abbreviated. For instance the last sentence before the list is "Sunt enim 21 triumphi qui 21 gradus alterius scale in profundum inferi mittentis."(Truly they are 21 triumphs which are 21 steps of another ladder cast into the deepest hell (the "another" is the game of cards mentioned before Triumphs)).

You can't see the whole sentence in the picture, but the part you can see, without the diacriticals (various lines and squiggles), which I am unable to reproduce, iis written: "triumphj qi 21 gdus alti scale i pfudu infer mittetis".

So the /i/-dash is "in", the /p/'s descender indicates it is "pro" (not "per", which is just a line), and the two /u/'s have a line over them indicating an abbreviated /n/ and /m/ respectively, and finally the dash over the /e/ in "mittetis" becomes "mittentis".

Abbreviated Latin is the norm, even in printed texts, up to the 18th century. See the Wikipedia article "Scribal Abbreviations" for more information -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation

The standard resource for tackling Latin paleography, with its abbreviations, is Adriano Cappelli's "Dizionario di abbreviature", which is in a lot of places on the web, for instances here:
http://www.hist.msu.ru/Departments/Medieval/Cappelli/
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