Path: ...!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail
From: Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Magna Carta sealed (15-6-1215)
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2024 11:18:53 +0100
Organization: $CABAL
Lines: 46
Message-ID: <dtnakkx8nl.ln2@news.ducksburg.com>
References: <v4l7oe$3mdif$1@dont-email.me>
X-Trace: individual.net ppxCAWIXsz03GYLLi0obvQhJfEG5L8AUM2oZGFgCYTZeQ1QFBP
X-Orig-Path: news.ducksburg.com!not-for-mail
Cancel-Lock: sha1:MLDml33dEwYmfC0l/qlHWjkTBn8= sha1:HUT/Z7AMtKCstzb75JoXi6NR7L0= sha256:Rq7LtT4Z7+YdxaE+e/hnqkwRo0eoONNSXQOf9LV40Z4=
User-Agent: slrn/pre1.0.4-6 (Linux)
Bytes: 2349

On 2024-06-15, 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 <p> with a crossbar on the descender, 
> and _nostra_ ('our') was written <nra> with a horizontal line above."
>
> *He should really have written: _et_ ('and').

From a legal blog about crazy people saying the Magna Carta entitled
them to resist COVID laws:

   As a matter of law and history, Magna Carta is now little more than
   a legal ornament rather than a living instrument, and it is rarely
   if ever successfully relied on in practice.

   It is a legal text which politicians and others can praise safely,
   as it provides no real protections.

   (In contrast, legal texts that do actually provide practical rights
   such as the Human Rights Act 1998 are often attacked by those same
   politicians.)

<https://davidallengreen.com/2020/11/the-truth-about-article-61-of-magna-carta/>



> (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.

Interesting.


-- 
In walks Barbarella, set to stun