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Appendix probi was a book written in 3rd-4th century AD to correct people's written Latin.

It consists of lines of the form "xxx non yyy", meaning that people commonly wrote yyy, where xxx is the "correct" form.

However, a line reads:

cannelam nun canianus

Why is "nun" used here?

Leaky Nun
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    Welcome to the site! Can you give a link (or other reference) to where you found this? The line number might also help. I assume there are differences between editions, and some sources may even contain typos. This looks interesting, but a little more context would help. – Joonas Ilmavirta May 13 '17 at 05:36
  • @JoonasIlmavirta It does look like a typo, after I've checked more sources. – Leaky Nun May 13 '17 at 06:13
  • I'm glad you could solve the problem yourself! +2 for that. – Joonas Ilmavirta May 13 '17 at 06:49

1 Answers1

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It was a typo.

All of the online sources I find have been based on the book Sprachlicher Kommentar zur vulgärlateinischen Appendix Probi, but in the book it was correctly printed as non (Page 5 of this document).

Therefore, I suspect that someone, when typing from that book, made a typographical error which is then spread everywhere.

On Page 73 of Lingüística Romanica, it is also correctly printed as non.

Leaky Nun
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    FYI it could also be an OCR error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition – blagae May 13 '17 at 09:34