22-05-2018, 08:22 PM
Only a small proportion of the population could write. It seems to me that those who were writing in Latin would be the same people who were writing in French.
Latin abbreviations were widely used in French, German, English, Italian, and Czech, so the ampersand was well-known during the medieval period (and is the kind of shape that shows up in cipher alphabets).
I don't have time to explicitly hunt for them, but if I come across ampersands in vernacular manuscripts, I'll post. Maybe we can get a sense of when they started using them in specific languages.
Latin abbreviations were widely used in French, German, English, Italian, and Czech, so the ampersand was well-known during the medieval period (and is the kind of shape that shows up in cipher alphabets).
I don't have time to explicitly hunt for them, but if I come across ampersands in vernacular manuscripts, I'll post. Maybe we can get a sense of when they started using them in specific languages.