Abbreviation in Old Norse manuscripts — a quantitative study

Abstract

Previous scholarship on the amount and distribution of abbreviation in manuscripts has noted that Icelandic manuscripts use more abbreviation than other vernaculars and that this increases in the medieval period. This study investigates these and related observations quantitatively, using the editions and transcriptions of the Menota and Skaldic projects, and refines them with respect to poetry and prose, and compares them with new studies on abbreviation in Latin and vernacular manuscripts. It is observed that the extent of abbreviation in Icelandic and Norwegian manuscripts relative to other traditions may have been overstated, but that Icelandic manuscripts in particular diverge from other traditions increasingly over time. A substantial difference is further observed in the abbreviation of poetry and prose in manuscripts that combine them, with the prose normally abbreviated around three times as much as poetry. This paper also develops a new measure of abbreviation based on marked-up expansions, showing the amount of writing surface area saved (abbreviation economy). This measure is closely comparable to the main existing measure in scholarship (proportion of abbreviated words) but can be applied to un-tokenised digital texts which only have expansions marked up. This measure is then applied to the Skaldic Project’s transcription database. The results give a long-term diachronic perspective on abbreviation, showing that abbreviation economy can be divided into three distinct periods, rising in the course of the Middle Ages, remaining extensive through the Reformation and then gradually declining up to the start of the nineteenth century.