When transcribing a section of E2, Christian came across an abbreviation not previously seen:
The character represents the word “sueldos”. I wondered if it was the standard abbreviation for “solidi” as on a number of occasions Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada’s “solidi” become “sueldos” in the Estoria, and it seemed reasonable to me that the scribe _could_ have seen the abbreviation in De Rebus Hispaniae and adapted it for the Castilian word in the Estoria (but I haven’t seen any manuscripts of DRH…). Fiona pointed out that “It is _clearly_ 2 long s letters with a downward strike for the abbreviation on the 2nd long s, i.e. $$ + abbrev mark. We see this with a single long $ and downward strike for the abbreviation of $er”.
This still leaves us with the question of how to expand it for our purposes. Fiona’s suggestion is “<choice><abbr>ss<am>̄</am></abbr><expan>s<ex>ueldo</ex>s</expan></choice>”, on the basis that it (or other variants) appear in many cases for other words. All of which seems reasonable to me, although I wonder about the status of this abbreviation, or more accurately I wonder of what it is an abbreviation. Is it an “s” with abbreviation mark, and therefore designed to represent, however distantly, some phonetic element? Or is it perhaps to be understood logographically? That is, does the symbol in its entirety stand for “sueldos” or “s(ueldos)”?