THE BRIEF RISE AND FALL OF A SUPERSCRIPT ABBREVIATION FOR THE FIRST PERSON SINGULAR PRONOUN IN THE WEST MIDLANDS BETWEEN 1250 AND 1500

This paper examines the strictly regional distribution in a handful of West Midlands counties of the first person singular pronoun, which contracts the spelling into a superscript variant . The data comes from the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) and the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LAEME).