5.3 Orthographic abbreviation. (A)   There are several ways that a clerk-recorder has used to treat names so as to reduce the length required to record them. These methods can be viewed as functions acting on character strings or graphemes usually designed in such a way as to extract only the most distinctive portions of the name. In almost every case the first part of the string seems to have been the most important. An example of the most extreme abbreviation of a name might be its reduction to a single initial. A close second in importance was the ending or coda. Cutting off the coda, or the last part, is truncation, whereas removal of the front is procope. Syncope could name the process that combines these two processes. We find similar processes at work in the two hidden dimensions of the grapheme and as parts of other kinds of variation. Figure 57 illustrates examples of the formerly very common method of abbreviation which might be called conflation. Seen as a process it might be construed to use or described in terms of two more elementary processes.

The different degrees of truncation and procope may be measured in terms of the length of the name spelling to be abbreviated. The conflation illustrated is a special kind of syncope whereby the clerk selects an appropriate proportion of the name (usually from one to four characters) to take from the front and attaches the final character of the name to these. Often this final character is raised above the line of writing, in which case the conflation must be described a little differently. Usually a clerk-extractor who is typing the name is unable to represent this raised coda. The transcriber then often reflects the fact that the form is an abbreviation by providing it with a final period. It should be clear from the examples that there are various lengths left after truncation, depending on which name is being abbreviated. The rule seems to depend directly on the length of the name before it is abbreviated. If it has only two vowels and the second is “y,” just preserve the first and last letter. If the name ends in “s” and it either begins with a consonant cluster or the second vowel is silent, truncate after the first vowel and preserve the final “s.” If the name has three or more syllables and the first letter is a consonant, preserve the initial letters until the second vowel, otherwise until the third; preserve only the last consonant or cluster that forms a distinct grapheme and any vowel that follows it. One exception to this rule is quite important in some cultures. This conflation abbreviation illustrates the use of a different string constant. In this case the Greek letter chi (X) abbreviates the first five characters of any given name beginning with the name Christ.

It may be helpful to walk through the example on figure 57. Suppose that William is the name to be abbreviated so that it becomes the proper-case input string (graphemes) to the conflation function: A_C(William). Ideally the function would also like to know how much space should be saved. The fact that the abbreviation may serendipidously correspond to abbreviations of other names would also be important, but probably cannot be known beforehand. The conflation function takes this information and analyzes the input string into two strings by the use of two functions: procope and truncation; it obtains these values and concatenates them together with the period “.” — a character constant. The rules give several possibilities for some names, so the output could be an array of several possible abbreviations. The first string to concatenate consists of as many characters from the front as indicated by the syllabic structure of the name and the above posited rules. This string is obtained as the output of the procope function A_P(William, length) where the length would be specified by the rules, so that it is first one and then four. The second string is the coda as returned by the truncation function A_T(William, length). Here again the rules could specify the length, which for William can only be one.

The information loss occurring with abbreviation has the consequence of raising the possibility of confusion or ambiguity resulting in uncertainty about the original form of the name represented. As with the graphological errors, the uncertainty introduced relates to the serendipidous collision with name variants in other name groups.