We tag superscript letters to show they appear differently from most of the other letters on the page. There are two reasons a scribe might use a superscript letter. It is important that you can identify between the two to know which of two tags to use.

1. Superscripts which are not abbreviations

The tags we use for superscripts which are not look like this:

<hi rend="sup">a</hi>

This would show up as a superscript 'a'. (ª)

Here are some other superscript tags you may come across:

Superscript e <hi rend="sup">e</hi>

Superscript s <hi rend="sup">s</hi>

Here is an example of a superscript s in a folio from the E1 manuscript, the corresponding tag and a shot of how it will show up in the edition:

Screen Shot 2014-10-10 at 14.01.15.png

It is quite common to see superscript letter used not as abbreviations when they come along the edge of a column. In such cases we assume the scribe has used a superscript to allow him to fit the end of the word into the column neatly. He is not using the superscript to represent suppressed (abbreviated) letters, but rather for reasons of space and neatness so the column boundaries of the page are neat.

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2. Superscripts which are abbreviations

Occasionally, scribes use a superscript letter as an abbreviation for more than just one letter. This is not the same as using a superscript to fit the word into a given space. In those cases we are only interested in tagging the appearance of the superscript. In the cases of superscripts being used as abbreviations, we need to use the abbreviation/expansion tag that we have already studied.

Have a look at this example:

In this example, the superscript o is an abbreviation for 'ro' as in 'otro', so we tag it between the <am> and </am>. The expansion is 'ro', so between the expansion tags (<ex> and </ex>) we write 'ro'.

Sometimes we see scribes use a superscript hook sign. This is usually an abbreviation for 'er' or 're'. Have a look at the example:

sup hook 3.png

The word here without the abbreviation is 'pregonar', where 'nar' appears on the line below. We are interested in the 'prego' part, and in particular the hook above the letter p.

We would tag this abbreviation as follows:

sup hook2.png

The abbreviation mark is the superscript hook, and the expansion is 're'.

This same abbreviation mark could also represent 'er'. To know whether to expand the hook to 'er' or 're' you can usually see what is in the transcription text you are editing as this is usually the unabbreviated form, you may already be familiar with the word and know the spelling, or if all else fails you can ask a question on the Textual Communities bulletin board and one of the Estoria team will get back to you.