Abbreviations

In our period we abbreviate certain words, e.g. Dr for Doctor. Such practice was widespread in the medieval period, when it was quite common for scribes to abbreviate syllables within words as well as complete words.

The number of abbreviations which medieval Welsh scribes used is quite limited. Most of them were in use in the Latin of the period and the syllables which they represent are never in doubt.

Some of the abbreviations need to be represented by special characters which have not yet been fully adopted by Unicode. As a result, not all the abbreviations can yet be easily shown on all computers. We therefore expand abbreviations in our transcriptions to the full forms of the words they represent. The forms of all abbreviations are described in the header files.

Expanded abbreviations are marked up between the <expan> and </expan> tags. They always occur within a word (<w>).

As an example, the name Peredur may be abbreviated in several ways, including:

<w>p<expan>er</expan>edur</w>
<w>p<expan>er</expan>ed<expan>ur</expan></w>