Gufier?

[Joel S. Berson]

At 7/3/2007 06:50 PM, you wrote:
>At 4:58 PM -0400 7/3/07, Philip E. Cleary wrote:
>
>>Someone on another list is trying to find out who or what a "gufier" is.
>>The word appears in an act of the assembly of Maryland in 1696 in the
>>phrase 'Merchants, Masters, Mates Gufiers Carpenters and Boatswains.'
>
>It's an OCR misprint for an abbreviated form of "Gunners." See the
>transcription of the 1696 Maryland act at:
>
>http://tinyurl.com/2q3upk (7th line)
>
>and then compare the .pdf image of the original document:
>
>http://tinyurl.com/3xkv8c (single page; 156 KB in size)
>
>showing the original word is "Guners", with a superscript line over
>the "n" indicating the omission of a letter.

The horizontal line over the "n" (looks like a macron) is a standard
abbreviation of the times (and dating back to the medieval, I've been
told) to indicate that the "accented" letter should be doubled.

Joel

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