From: no_email@invalid.invalid   
      
   Ross Clark  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 
 with a crossbar on the descender,   
   > and _nostra_ ('our') was written  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.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)