Omission of a syllable or a letter
Sometimes it is not a whole word that is omitted through haplography, but a repeated syllable or even letter. For example, Mil. 54 is rightly written in A thus: “ATPEDITASTELLIQVIAERANTSIVIVIVERENT,” that is “at péditastelli quía erant, sivi víverent,
” “they were mere tag-rag-and-bobtail infantry, so I let them live.” The repetition of the syllable vi proved a stumbling-block to the scribe of P, who wrote si viverent for sivi viverent, leaving a hiatus in the metre (between quia and erant). We may be sure, though we have not the testimony of A to help us, that it is a similar error which has obscured the name of Plautus in Merc. 10, “eadém Latine Mércator Maccí Titi”, where the repetition of the three similarly - written syllables (see ch. vi. § 1) ci-ti-ti led to the corruption mactici in P—a corruption faithfully preserved by B, but in CD changed to mattici. An instance from the original of CD is Pseud. 246, “quid hóc est? quis ést qui morám mi occupáto”, where moram mi, probably written in the archetype1 morammi, became in the original of CD moram, with loss of the pronoun. A particularly common case is the omission of the final letter of a word when the following word begins with the same letter. Thus the words sic cogis, written siccogis, would run great danger of being miscopied sicogis (si cogis), me experti would become mexperti, and so on.
