Andrew West wrote:
> And in other European languages, a tilde above a vowel was a common
> abbreviation for vowel plus "n" or "m".
>
Similarly for English. Old manuscripts often put a macron over a vowel
to show it was followed by "n" or "m". They also have some other quirks
like using y for thorn (even in handwriting) and various superscripts.
Thus "Þe" ("The") might be written "Yⁱ".
(And if your Unicode font displayed that last one correctly it is definitely
au courant :-)
- Frank
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