abbreviations - Can one abbreviate the Spanish given name José María to José Mª in English, like in Spanish?


According to the English Wikipedia,



José María (abbreviated José Mª) is a Spanish language male given name, usually considered a single given name rather than two names[.]



[Related, possibly helpful, but ignorable, questions to the title question:] Is the symbol (?) 'ª' even recognised in English? Do otherwise Spanish-speaking North-Americans use it, also in English?



Answer



So-called "superscript contractions" used to be a common practice in English, when handwriting was much more common, but it is now considered obsolete. This Cambridge course on early Modern English handwriting gives the following advice to students:



superscript characters, often a form of contraction which may imply preceding omitted characters, as in wch for 'which'. Other common contractions of this type include yr for 'your' or 'yowr'; Sr for 'Sir' and Mr for 'Master'; wt or wth for 'with' (and wthout for 'without'); maty for 'maiesty' or maties for 'maiesties'; and words ending in -mt for '-ment', such as gouernemt for 'gouernement' or parliamt for 'parliament'.



Wikipedia glosses over this practice, giving nothing useful to quote.


This practice also extended to personal names, for example J os for Joseph or Wm for William. The following excerpt from an 1877 land atlas contains at least 3 examples that I can see:


map snippet with superscript contractions


It was mostly an artifact of handwriting, occasionally printed, but fell out of use with automated typesetting. Nowadays you see them in only a few places such as ordinals (1st , 2nd , 3rd ) and special symbols such as the TrademarkTM symbol.


So to actually answer your question, a few people might recognize what you're trying to do, but they would find it odd or contrived. The rest would just be confused.


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