A sign/abbreviation for "magister"

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Sat, 27 Oct 2018 05:58:38 -0700
Asmus Freytag via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> On 10/27/2018 4:10 AM, Janusz S. Bień via Unicode wrote:

>> you can see 2 occurences of a symbol which is explicitely explained
>> (in Polish) as meaning "Magister".
 
>> First question is: how do you interpret the symbol? For me it is
>> definitely the capital M followed by the superscript "r" (written in
>> an old style no longer used in Poland), but there is something below
>> the superscript. It looks like a small "z", but such an
>> interpretation
>> doesn't make sense for me.
 
>> The second question is: are you familiar with such or a similar
>> symbol? Have you ever seen it in prin> 
>> The third and the last question is: how to encode this symbol in
>> Unicode?

> My suspicion would be that the small "z" is rather a "=" that
> acquired a connecting stroke as part of quick handwriting.

The notation is a quite widespread format for abbreviations.  the
first letter is normal sized, and the subsequent letter is written in
some variety of superscript with a squiggle underneath so that it
doesn't get overlooked.  I have deduced that this is not plain text
because there is no encoding mechanism for it.  For example, our
lecturers would frequently use this treatment to abbreviate function
as 'fn' with the 'n' superscript and supported by a squiggle below
sitting on the baseline.  The squiggle below has meaning; it marks the
word as an abbreviation.

Richard.