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A Missing Letter (from FB)

This is not what I intended to write about today (I hope I'll get to that later), but I gave a little presentation to the Shalem School faculty yesterday on the life and work of R. Avraham bar Chiyya (one of my favorite subjects), and in the process of preparing it I got to take a look at a manuscript of the Liber Embadorum, Plato of Tivoli's Latin translation of RABC's חיבור המשיחה והתשבורת. The manuscript is housed at the Galileo Museum, which very kindly put the digitized version up online. You can see the text of the definition of a point below:




This definition is actually one of the more interesting parts of the translation, because it totally ignores RABC's actual words and just substitutes the common Euclidean definition instead! (I've written about this elsewhere and, contra Steinschneider and Curtze, do not believe that RABC's definition is just a rephrasing of Euclid's.)


But that's not what caught my eye here. Look at the first indented line, which is supposed to be the abovementioned definition. The Latin text printed in Curtze's edition is "Punctum est cuius nulla pars est," meaning "a point is that of which the part is nothing." What you can see here, however, is "Unt (squiggle) e (line on top) cui (squiggle) nulla ps (line through p) e (line on top)"--welcome to the wonderful world of medieval Latin manuscripts! The squiggles and lines are accepted methods of abbreviation: e with a line is the very common "est" (is), cui with a line is the very common "cuius" (of which), and so on. But while I can understand the squiggle at the end of "Unt" as standing for the ending "um", that would still only give "Untum". What happened to the "p" and "c" necessary to make the presumed "punctum" (point)?


The answer to the first question lies a short distance away from that first "U". Look straight to the left and you'll see a very faint little "p". That little "p" is there for the artist that was going to work on this manuscript after it was finished, and would let him know that the fancy letter he should create in the indentation there is "p". Unfortunately, this manuscript never seems to have made it into the hands of said artist, and we're left with an empty indentation, a tiny, faint "p", and a glimpse into the world of medieval manuscript writing practices! I presume that, upon finishing his work, the artist would then have erased the small "p".


As for the "c", I'm less certain, and see two possibilities. The first, which I think is more likely, is that the scribe was, like the author, Italian, and misspelled the word under the influence of the Italian cognate "punto". I haven't examined the manuscript at all to see whether the scribe does this elsewhere. The second, less likely answer, is that the "t" is actually a "c", and the abbreviation represents "tum"! You can see that the scribe writes his "c"s as a straight horizontal line attached to a curved stem. While he usually doesn't pick up his pen, perhaps this time he did and the horizontal line slightly missed the top of the curved stem.

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