© 2002 by Association for Literary & Linguistic Computing
Encoding Medieval Abbreviations for Computer Analysis (from Latin–Portuguese and Portuguese Non-literary Sources)
1 University of Oxford, UK 2 Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
This paper proposes a solution to the problem of handling scribal abbreviations in TEI-conformant transcriptions of medieval texts, following a conservative editorial strategy. A key distinction is drawn between alphabetic abbreviations, which represent sequences of letters, and logographic abbreviations which represent whole words. The TEI elements 
expan
and abbrev can be used systematically to separate these two types: alphabetic abbreviations will be expanded in the main text, recording the abbreviated form (including TEI entities representing the main abbreviation marks) as an attribute of expan, while logographic abbreviations will be represented in their abbreviated form, with the expanded form recorded as an attribute of abbrev. The proposals are illustrated from common abbreviations and short text samples from tenth-century Latin–Portuguese and thirteenth-century Old Portuguese.