[DCRM-L] German abbreviations from 1605/1618

[JOHN LANCASTER]

Ted - “mehr” may be indeclinable today, but this is the (early) 17th century, before German grammar (and vocabulary, and orthography) was regularized - it’s been a while (about 50 years) since I last studied the grammar of early modern German, but I’ve continued to read early texts from time to time, so it doesn’t surprise me to see “mehr’ being declined like any other adjective.  I’d read it more or less as “for the sake of greater accuracy and order” (not the best English perhaps - if I were doing a full translation of the whole phrase, I might be less literal), followed by for whom and then what was done in this edition.  Eric Blackall’s The emergence of German as a literary language (1959; rev. ed. 1978) would be worth a look, if you’re going to be spending time with books of that period.  There are probably more recent and more technical studies, but Blackall is highly readable (full disclosure: it was his course that I took, way back when, so I have a bias).

John


> On Sep 16, 2015, at 9:13 PM, Ted P Gemberling <tgemberl at uab.edu> wrote:
> 
> John, 
> Thanks for the information on that. So one theory is that it is understood as “vm” and they just used the wrong m, and another is that it was an abbreviation for “vmm,” a different spelling of the word.
>  
> Here is just one question, though, which shows my knowledge of German grammar is real rusty: what is genitive in “mehrer Richtigkeit und Ordnung”? Is mehrer the word that is genitive? Do Richtigkeit and Ordnung not need to be in genitive form if the adjective is? Could you tell me what the dictionary form of mehrer is?  It seems it can’t be a form of “mehr” (more) because my dictionary says that is “indeclinable,” meaning it doesn’t take case endings. Is it “mehrere” (several, various)? If that’s right, the genitive today would apparently be “mehrerer” rather than “mehrer”:
> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mehrere <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mehrere>
>  
> Could it be mehr was “declinable” in 1605?
>  
> Thanks, Ted 
>  
> From: dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu [mailto:dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu] On Behalf Of JOHN LANCASTER
> Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2015 6:42 PM
> To: DCRM Revision List
> Subject: Re: [DCRM-L] German abbreviations from 1605/1618
>  
> I read it as just “vm” (= um), with an error in the “m” - the wrong sort was in the case, and nobody noticed.  It makes perfect sense: “um [genitive] willen” = “for the sake of”.
>  
> And “vñ” is a fairly common space-saver for “vnd” in this period.
>  
> The title page is not, however, engraved, but letterpress - type within a woodcut border (the red not quite in register, most likely printed second).
>  
> John Lancaster
>  
>  
> On Sep 16, 2015, at 6:46 PM, Ted P Gemberling <tgemberl at uab.edu <mailto:tgemberl at uab.edu>> wrote:
> 
> 
> I hope someone can give me some enlightenment on two abbreviations I see on this title page. If you look at the first page of this, an engraved title page for a collection of surgical writings by Paracelsus from 1618:
> http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/t7tm8155g#view=1up;seq=5 <http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/t7tm8155g#view=1up;seq=5>
>  
> You’ll notice that about half way into the title, following “auch” and before “mehrer Richtigkeit vnd Ordnung willen,” there is what looks like a v followed by an m, topped by what appears to be the “missing letters” abbreviation on p. 188 of DCRM(b). Does anyone know what is being abbreviated here? On this page, which appears to be generally well transcribed, it is left as “vm” with the sign over the m:
>  
> https://books.google.com/books?id=fTgPAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA85&lpg=PA85&dq=mehrerrichtigkeit&source=bl&ots=4Q7xDz1vBC&sig=U5OdO3WIUXXEyKmMcsNoLuB-Oxg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEYQ6AEwCWoVChMIvMip1bb8xwIVylYeCh3NQwjx#v=onepage&q=mehrerrichtigkeit&f=false <https://books.google.com/books?id=fTgPAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA85&lpg=PA85&dq=mehrerrichtigkeit&source=bl&ots=4Q7xDz1vBC&sig=U5OdO3WIUXXEyKmMcsNoLuB-Oxg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEYQ6AEwCWoVChMIvMip1bb8xwIVylYeCh3NQwjx#v=onepage&q=mehrerrichtigkeit&f=false>
>  
> That’s on p. 13 of the electronic book. I suppose that since this printer uses v in initial position for u, this could simply be “um.” But then why the abbreviation mark? And would “um” make sense here?
>  
> I also toyed with the idea of “vom,” with the abbreviation showing loss of the o, but vom would not make sense because the noun agreeing with it would have to be masculine, and Richtigkeit is feminine.
>  
> Now, the copy that I am cataloging is actually a 1605 edition, which, instead of “hohem Nutz vnd Verstandt,” two lines down from there, has “hohem Nutz vn Verstandt,” with the n in vn topped with the abbreviation sign. Since the 1618 edition spells vnd out, I suppose there is no problem in interpreting the 1605 form as an abbreviation for that. Was that a typical abbreviation practice?
>  
> I particularly hope someone will have an idea about how to transcribe the first abbreviation.
>  
> I notice this German-language record, which has fairly extensive transcription, skips over those words: 912483569. Apparently the cataloger didn’t consider them essential to the sense of the title.
>  
> Thanks, 
> Ted P. Gemberling
> Historical Collections Cataloger
> UAB Lister Hill Library, rm. 234B
> 1720 Second Ave. South
> Birmingham, Ala. 35294-0013
> Phone: (205)934-2461
> Fax: (205)934-3545

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