13th c. transcription: dimidietas vs. dimidia vs. dimidiatus

Latin Learning Latin
1

I am transcribing a 13th-century English court hand document and cannot decide exactly when to expand the abbreviation “di’” (sometimes dim’”) into “dimidietas, dimidietatis” and when to expand it into “dimidia, dimidiae.” I believe that I found an important clue in Lewis & Short here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aalphabetic+letter%3DD%3Aentry+group%3D36%3Aentry%3Ddimidio ; however, this deals with the perfect passive participle “didmidiatus, a, um” rather than the noun “dimidietas, dimidietatis” (whose entry is also found in Lewis & Short). This leads me to believe that I now have to consider “didmidiatus, a, um” as a third option!

It may be easier if I provide an example so that you can decide how you would expand it in context:
… sigh. It will not let me copy/paste the footnotes. I am going to make some up. I will use symbols in parentheses instead, e.g. “(@).” The notes themselves will be at the bottom.

“Pars ¶ Ciro[graphum] sub n[omine] Nichol[ai] de Daltorp’ fil[ii] Ade p[er]sone(#) de 4 m. red[endis] ad Pasch[am] a[nno] r[egni] r[egis] H[enrici] 22 20 s.($) et ad Pasch[am] p[ro]x[imam] 2 m. et di[midia] ¶ In[de] sol[v]untur 20 s. an[te] t[er]minu[m].”

As in “Partially repaid ¶ A loan under the name of Nicholas de Daltorp son of Ade Persone for 4 marcs to be repaid at Easter in the 22nd year of the reign of king Henry for 20 s. and at the next Easter 2 and half marcs. ¶ From which 20 marcs have been paid back before due.”

It may help to look at the original manuscript here: http://imgur.com/a/yw963

The above discussion concerns the first entry – I only included the other entry because of footnote 5.

So because of the footnotes, I guess this is actually a tricky way of me asking 3 questions for the price of one, lol. Sorry! In any event, my primary concern is how to extend the “di’.” If anyone happens to know how to extend the “.p.” to the left of the entry or if “p’sone” is a name or word, that would also be amazing.

Thanks so much for the help!!!

:smiley:

(@). Should I take this as “pars, partis” (portion, piece, share), “particeps, participis” (sharer, partaker) or as “participatio, participationis” (participation in, sharing in”)? Perhaps even as the perfect passive participle of “participo, participare, participavi, participatus.” Regardless of the word, what case would you put it in?

(#). This is written “p’sone,” however, the “p” used has a horizontal line through its stem. This often indicates that it stands for “per.” I have also seen it stand for “pro.” Which would you recommend? Also, this could be an actual abbreviation for a real word i.e., not a name? It is very unusual for a scribe not to write the customary “et dicti A.” after the name of the first person as shown in the entry below the entry concerning the main topic of the post: “¶ Cirographum sub nomine Ricardi Blundel filii Walteri de Toflesby et dicti Abrahami de 20 s. reddendo ad quindenam Pascham anno regni regis Henrici 23.”

($). This may be confusing. It means as in “… due at Easter in the year of the reign of king Henry 22 [i.e., the 22nd year of the reign of the king]: 20 s. …” In other words, 20 s. due on Easter in the 22nd year of the reign of the king.

2

I’m no expert on this kind of text but here are some ideas:

  • Ad(a)e p(er)son(a)e, Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, p. 790-792, has a detailed entry on the this word (‘individual/man’, ‘someone of a certain standing’, ‘dignitary’, ‘parson’, etc). I’ll let you decide which meaning fits the context best here.

  • m. et di., I’d go for dimidium “half”, so depending on the sentence, it could be marcis et dimidio, marcas et dimidium, etc.

3

Singular dimidium (“one-half”) works out arithmetically, doesn’t it?

According to Wikipedia, an English mark in the post-Conquest era was an accounting entry equivalent to 160 d.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_(currency)#England_and_Scotland

So a loan of 4 marks would be equivalent to 640 d (4 x 160).

20 s. is equivalent to 240 d (12 pence to the shilling).

2 1/2 marks would be equivalent to 400 d (2 1/2 x 160).

240 d paid early plus 400 d payable at the Easter due date works out to the original loan balance of 640 d.

So I would agree with Shenoute’s suggestion to expand et dim. to et dimidium.

4

Thank you so much! Great catch that the “e” is actually a monophthongised “ae,” I completely missed that. Also, thank you for the answer to the “personae” mystery. I had never heard of Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, and I really appreciate your letting me know about it. I seriously doubt there is any free way to access it, but if there is please let me know… I am going to ahead and order it via interlibrary loan now though.

I have to confess that I still am a bit unsure about how to treat “di’” in the future, and I hope it is ok if I ask some follow-up questions:

  1. Since you recommend “dimidium,” (which, if an adjective, cannot agree with the feminine marca, ae) you are taking it as a noun, right? So it is not “and two marcs and a half [a marc]” (i.e., “di’” functioning as an adjective modifying an implied [marc]); rather, it is “and two marcs and a half” full stop (i.e., “a half” is a noun in and of itself).

  2. I think you are correct, but I just was curious because (this is only regarding nouns) I see that Whittaker’s Words has “dimidium, i” neut., while latin-dictionary.net has only “dimidia, ae” fem. and “dimidietas, tatis” fem. with no listing for the neuter form. Would you happen to know which is classically correct and which was common usage in the middle ages?

  3. Is there a situation when I should ever use “dimidietas, tatis” instead? I ask because of the Lewis & Short entry referenced in the original post. I do not fully understand the difference. It actually applies to the participle of “dimidio,” but the fact that a distinction exists concerns me. I copied and pasted it here to save you the time of clicking on it:

“(under the verb “dimidio”)…but freq. and class. in the perf. part. dīmĭ-dĭātus , halved, half (acc. to Varr. ap. Gell. 3, 14, 19, applied to a whole, which is divided into halves; whereas dimidius is applied to a half; or, as Gellius rightly explains it, dimidiatum nisi ipsum, quod divisum est, dici haud convenit; dimidium vero est, non quod ipsum dimidiatum est, sed quae ex dimidiato pars altera est; cf. however, dimidius, I.): homines dimidiati, Cato ap. Gell. l. l.; cf. id. R. R. 151, 3; and comic.: procellunt sese in mensam dimidiati (with half the body), dum appetunt…”

If I had to guess Niermeyer will probably clear most of this up for me, so the only really pressing question is the first one. If you happen to know the others though, that would be fantastic.

I do not think that I will be able to do this entire document without help, so I really appreciate the assistance.

Thank you so much again!

p.s. Any opinion on how to decline “ .p. “ in the left margin before the entry?

Edit: I just ran into “di’ m.” as in " half a marc" as opposed to the above “ii m. et di’” two marcs and a half. Should the “di” potentially be treated any differently (e.g., as an adjective) with the change in word order?

5

You’re welcome.

As far as dimidium is concerned, I should precise a couple of things:

  • yes, I take dimidium as a noun “the/a half (part)”
  • I do not know that it’s correct. I only think it could be, and (for reasons too long to expose here) I very much prefer it to other solutions like marcis et dimidietate (using the noun dimidietas) or marcis et dimidiato (using the participle of dimidio)
  • since we are dealing with administrative lingo from the Middle Ages, dictionaries of Classical (literary) Latin may not be very helpful
  • the only way to reach a certain level of certainty would be to find texts in which the sentence is written in full.

Sorry, no idea about .p. :slight_smile:

Edit: I just ran into “di’ m.” as in " half a marc" as opposed to the above “ii m. et di’” two marcs and a half. Should the “di” potentially be treated any differently (e.g., as an adjective) with the change in word order?

Yes, I would agree with reading di. m as dimidia marca (the group having to be declined according to its role in the sentence of course), ‘half a marc’, with di. being the adjective dimidius, a, um here.

6

Thinking a little more about this, I wonder whether the court official responsible for maintaining the register actually had a complete word in a grammatically correct Latin sentence in mind when he wrote an abbreviation. Latin was not his first language, and I suspect that to him abbreviations like dim. were simply logograms like the dollar sign “$” or pound sign or “1/2”, and he didn’t bother to mentally construct perfect Latin sentences when he wrote the entries.

And in any case, even if he had some grammatical form of a word represented by an abbreviation in mind, there’s really no way we can tell exactly what that was, as evidenced by the various possibilities raised in this thread.

Wouldn’t it be better – more accurate, involving less guesswork on the part of the transcriber – simply to leave the abbreviations alone in the transcription, rather than trying to guess what the fully written out word would have been in the mind of the court official and filling in the transcriber’s guess in brackets?

After all, we can interpret his entries quite well without being sure exactly what the fully written out word would look like.